[melville_X]

For anyone who wants to see a preview of Sabu's entrapment of anonymous members, one of his chat logs were leaked:

http://cryptome.org/2012/09/sanguinarious-sabu.htm

> Why is an informant going around throwing out a location to a claimed cache of classified documents concerning SCADA systems? So this is like a textbook attempt at entrapment, its akin to giving someone a key to a door but telling them its legal to open it with, someone being an informant, to take them down after. It also does not appear the FBI gives not one fuck about the security of critical infrastructure as long as it entraps another kid. Nothing at all wrong here is there? Full transcript: http://cryptome.org/2014/05/sabu-m45t3rs4d0w8-2012-0330-0524...

Perfect example of the FBI looking for easy arrests using morally-vague methods of entrapment, instead of doing the hard work and stopping real criminal conspiracies. This is a technique they perfected in domestic terrorism cases where they find dumb criminals with no skill, financing, or strong motivation, then give them all of the resources and information they need to do conduct a real scheme. While holding their hand along the way.

Makes great headlines when they arrest someone "domestic terrorist caught by FBI!" but hardly a good use of resources when they keep missing real terrorist attacks.

Bruce Schneier nailed it in 2007: https://www.schneier.com/essay-174.html. None of the 'foiled plots' were ever a real threat until the FBI showed up. People could argue these people should be in jail anyway but they are hardly worth the skill and resources of the most advanced investigators in the country.

[afarrell]

Quick illustrated guide to what the legal concept of Entrapment actually is: http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-wa...

By a former New York prosecutor.

[tptacek]

This whole series is pretty great. The cheat sheet here:

Entrapment requires:

(1) a causal relationship between police action and the accused's commission of a crime, and

(2) the police overcoming some demonstrable resistance to the commission of that crime, or the accused otherwise demonstrating that the police somehow corrupted them into committing a crime they would not have been predisposed to commit otherwise.

The "entrapment myths" in the comic:

1. That the police have to tell you that they're cops, or are somehow not allowed to deceive you into committing a crime. (No).

2. That the police cannot ask you to commit a crime. (No).

3. That the police cannot break the law themselves to get themselves into a position to see you commit a crime. (No).

4. That the police cannot help you commit a crime. (No).

5. That the police cannot allow you to commit a crime or somehow give you the impression that your actions are lawful and then arrest you. (No).

The law expects you to actively resist an entreaty from anyone --- undercover cop, uniformed cop, friend, family member --- to knowingly break the law.

The example the comic gives of an unreasonable effort to break through resistance: appealing to a friend to aid in the commission of a crime because your life depends on it, putting the accused in a position where a reasonable ordinary person might choose to participate in the crime as the lesser of two evils. That's entrapment.

Furthermore, as I understand it, and this may be state-by-state, but entrapment is doubly difficult to employ in a defense because it's an affirmative defense: to raise "entrapment", you must first acknowledge that you committed the crime in all its particulars, and then claim that your excuse was that you were entrapped.

[melville_X]

Yes that's the definition of entrapment as interpreted by American courts. Very challenging for lawyers to use as a defense. Which is exactly why law enforcement loves using informants and undercover agents for everything these days. In heavily bureaucratic agencies like the FBI, the only thing that matters is looking good to management by getting arrests and 'foiling plots'. So why not go for some easy prosecutions? You'll be upper management in no time.

Plus there are a ton of dumb people and nearly everything is a crime these days, so all you have to do his handout a crime on a platter and fill prisons with the incompetent criminals who take the bait.

Why hunt down criminals when you can fish for dumb ones.

[tptacek]

The crimes we're talking about here aren't "the crimes every American commits while squeezing orange juice in the morning" crimes.

Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily difficult to catch people in the act of committing computer crimes; the most effective investigative approach to enforcing computer crime laws probably is to find people who are predisposed to commit them, stage an opportunity to commit a specific instance of it, and then apprehend them. So, yes, computer crime enforcement does have a "fishing for dumb people" element to it.

What would be really interesting in a thread like this is, after pointing out how US criminal law makes it hard to raise an entrapment defense, providing specific examples of how some other country's criminal law handles the same circumstances.

[walshemj]

There was a BBC program a couple of years back on secret services MI5/6 and they contrasted how we do it in the UK and The USA.

One example was an IRA arms dealer caught bang to rights actually at the buying point he got off on a tiny technicality - whereas the amount of stuff that the FBI where allowed to do was interesting and slightly disturbing.

It might have been on PBS or BBC America at some point

[afarrell]

yes, you can find all of them at http://lawcomic.net/guide/?page_id=5. Including this handy 4th amendment guide: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2256

[joe_the_user]

Which is to say that almost nothing that most people would recognize as entrapment is actually prohibited by the current legal understanding of entrapment, right?...

... Yeah

Edit: Down votes - with no comments? I'm pretty sure the other responses actually agree with my claim.

What is the problem here, cowards?

[dang]

Please follow the site guidelines and don't complain about downvotes—all it does is lower the signal/noise ratio. Everyone gets downvoted. It doesn't matter.

[joe_the_user]

Oddly enough, all you are doing is complaining about me complaining...

[RoboTeddy]

He's bringing down the number of needless complaints over the long run. If he has to complain a bit in the short term to make it happen, well, that's worth it!

[joe_the_user]

Only if he convince me to stop.

As it is, the fact that we're having this "conversation" at all mostly shows HN is declining in quality. I seldom complain about downvotes but when there's no comments and no obvious justification, it seems reasonably warranted.

[lotsofmangos]

I suspect a hell of a lot of time is wasted in basically trolling the mentally ill on facebook.

[thefreeman]

Oddly enough, I keep getting a bad signature on that post using the public key here: https://sanguinarious.wordpress.com/gpg-public-key/

Anyone else having this issue? I am no expert in with gpg so it could be on my end.