Mad wrote:Wouldn't the FBI see the link from tinyurl? That still should be a tipoff, and I'm sure they realize that a certain amount of hits are false positives from situations like these. It's not very comforting, though, and it's certainly not something I'd want to count on.
Yes, I would like to think the FBI are competent enough to understand the concept of "prank", even one gone horribly awry. Most days I can even believe this is true.
Local law enforcement, however, may be a different story.
Of course, it seems that the FBI hasn't even gotten involved here (yet?).
We are unlikely to see any FBI investigation that may be underway - if there even is one.
This reminds me of an incident on an aviation e-mail list I was on, where someone started asking very pointed and suspicious questions about modifying an ultralight for "crop-spraying". I won't go into details, suffice to say that a whole lot of alarm bells were going off on the list. The ONLY thing we ever got was a single post from one person with a government e-mail address saying "You can calm down - we are taking care of it" and that was it. I would also like to point out that no one on that list (outside of the offending member) ever experienced anything bad from one dumbshit showing up. Law enforcement is conversant with the concept of "innocent bystander" and "innocent victim".
Likewise, I wouldn't expect to see
anything overt for an investigation of this incident. If anyone would know anything or be contacted it would be Mike, and I see no reason why he would need to share anything about such a thing with us.
What we're apparently seeing is the IT staff of several organizations seeing something that looks like potential illegal activity and trying to save themselves future trouble by getting rid of the apparent offenders.
Which, although not proven, is certainly plausible. My former employer had VERY strict rules on internet use at work and I have seen more than one employee abruptly escorted out the door the same day as violating one of the rules. A lot depends on what sort of monitoring is going on, and how efficiently it is done. The system at that employer was so efficient it was getting people into trouble for accessing
legitimate topics (after all, both porn and medical research contain terms like "breast" and "penis") although I am happy to say that as time went by the filtering became more sophisticated and there were fewer false positives.
Actually, I think there may be more to fear from anxious employers than from actual law enforcement - employers in the US have great freedom to fire people for "policy violations", even when only suspected, whereas the police have to actually prove someone is guilty.
