What constitutes "a visit to a child pornography site"?
Say this was not on TOR but the regular internet. Say I masked the URL of this child porn website with a popular URL shortening service and posted that link here saying "read this!" You click this link and are surprised and quickly close the page.
You visited a child porn site!
But now imagine in that ONE visit the FBI exploited an undisclosed vulnerability in your browser. Now they spy on your malware infected machine.
Would you be happy? I'm not saying this happened but it's possible when you allow this sort of activity to happen in your country.
Say this was not on TOR but the regular internet. Say I masked the URL of this child porn website with a popular URL shortening service and posted that link here saying "read this!" You click this link and are surprised and quickly close the page.
But that isn't what happened here. Or even close to it.
A better analogy here is something like the FBI staking out an illegal dog fighting ring (which isn't exactly easy to get into in the first place) and then tracking the cars of people who visited it.
Maybe they should have to get a warrant, maybe not - I think there are valid arguments on both sides of that.
But let's not pretend these people didn't know exactly what they were doing. These aren't innocent people tricked into it.
I mean the argument still holds for TOR I imagine. Aren't there .onion URL shorteners (I honestly don't know)?
You're probably right that these people weren't tricked at any point. But setting a precedent that it's ok for government agencies to inject malware and attack citizen computers seems like a very slippery slope.
Boobytraps, land mines, etc. are often banned because they attack people without discretion. Injecting malware into someone's machine just because they stumble upon an URL (be it .com, .onion, .xxx or .whatever) sounds criminal to me regardless of who is running the show.
I can't imagine what a warrant for this scenario would look like given it was on TOR? Who would it be issued for?
I would guess that you could put a proxy in-front of the Tor URL on a clearnet domain and set the X-Forwarded-For header to the IP of the actual visitor. If they trust forwarding proxies than it's easy to implicate someone. If they don't, it's easy to hide from them.
But the same argument holds true for general possession laws. Take some illegal images, plant it on someone's computer, phone in an anonymous tip, boom jail time for an innocent person. It's the whole problem with possession of anything being a crime. Same with drugs. Just accessing something is an even scarier thought.
This is precisely why it's kind of scary that the FBI did what it did to apprehend these people. But we should not think that at the end of the day, the people caught should be free to go because of the means by which the FBI caught them. They each have their days in court.
Say this was not on TOR but the regular internet. Say I masked the URL of this child porn website with a popular URL shortening service and posted that link here saying "read this!" You click this link and are surprised and quickly close the page.
You visited a child porn site!
But now imagine in that ONE visit the FBI exploited an undisclosed vulnerability in your browser. Now they spy on your malware infected machine.
Would you be happy? I'm not saying this happened but it's possible when you allow this sort of activity to happen in your country.