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It's possible that installing malware on a machine could be legal if the police have a warrant to wiretap that specific machine. However, in this case, they indiscriminately pushed malware to thousands of users on that site, many of whom were probably not doing anything illegal. So how does this not violate the Fourth Amendment?

The Fourth Amendment says: "No Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...

The government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.

They still poison medicines. Hydrocodone, a Schedule II substance, drops to Schedule III when sold with acetaminophen, a substance toxic to the liver.

This is ridiculous. Acetaminophen is Tylenol. Are you seriously trying to make the argument that Tylenol is a poison?

Arsenic is a poison. Lead is a poison. Cyanide is a poison. Tylenol becomes toxic at a certain threshold (like every other substance on the earth for that matter).

Sure, it is toxic to your liver in large doses. That isn't why Tylenol 3 is Schedule II while pure Codeine is Schedule II. The difference is in dosage. Tylenol 3 tends to come in doses of around 5mg Codeine to 300-500mg Tylenol. You get T3 when you have a tooth taken out, or maybe some minor stitches. You are also only given a few pills.

You get pure Codeine when you break a bone or stick a pencil through your eye. Or one of the stronger codeine-derivatives (oxycodeine, etc). These come in larger doses and are more prone to abuse.

Hence Schedule III.

I'm no fan of the DEA or the schedule system...but the "Government" isn't poisoning anyone. That's pure FUBAR and true tin-foil-hattery. Its a classification system for the abuse potential of perfectly legal drugs.

http://www.medicinenet.com/tylenol_liver_damage/article.htm#...

Yes, but in rare cases. Acetaminophen is not the easiest thing in the world for your body to deal with. But this is technically correct and in the 99 percent case you're correct so this is kind of belaboring the point.

Nevertheless, I thought it was worth mentioning.

Sure, but you can make that argument for virtually any substance. A particular combination of genetics and <insert molecular compound> will equal a bad reaction in some portion of the population. It's practically guaranteed due to the nature of genetics and statistics.

The FDA is considering a black label warning for acetaminophen and recently changed the max "recommendation" down from 4 grams daily to 2.3g (IIRC). It is most definitely a liver toxin with therapeutic index that's not so amazing.

People get prescribed ratios of 100:1 APAP:hydrocodone (750/7.5 for example) - it's idiotic from a health and safety perspective. If you need opiate painkillers such as hydrocodone or oxycodone, the extra APAP is unlikely to be of much benefit, and you can always just take some APAP on the side. The APAP is there purely to "prevent" abuse.

I'm not suggesting the "Government is poisoning people" as a conspiracy, I'm suggesting the same idiotic politics and ideas at play during alcohol prohibition are still alive.

> At what other point in history has police distributed a completly illegal tool onto unsuspected and non-targeted civilians?

It might be a stretch but..

"LSD was one of the materials tested in the MKUltra program. The final phase of LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

Thank you. It was a covert human research operation experiment rather than police enforcement, but it still bear some meaning on this issue. The government offered one victims family an out-of-court settlement of $750,000.

If the government release a virus and it cause damages, government might be found liable. Still, an out-of-court settlement is not exactly a predicate, so its hard to know what would happen.

I think the most troubling aspect of this case is that the FBI modified the computers systems before Ireland seized them as evidence. It seems absurd that law enforcement can effectively tamper with evidence before it is secured, then use that tainted evidence as part of a prosecution.

Is there any indication that this evidence is used? This was under discussion around the Bundestrojaner in Germany whether such a computer can be used as evidence. I doubt that this won't come under severe scrutiny at least in Germany.

> It has to my knowledge never happen, but it would be interesting to know if the cop could be held liable if someone dies from a overdose from those drugs.

From some quick researching, it seems the government in the US is more and more prosecuting the dealers, or even the person who gave someone the drugs if there is a death. You give your friend Bob some methamphetamine, and Bob dies, you're more than likely getting charged with second degree murder if they can prove you are the source.

>At what other point in history has police distributed a >completly illegal tool onto unsuspected and non-targeted >civilians?

For quite a while. Law enforcement have installed physical surveilance and tracking devices since as long as they have existed - and unsuspecting innocents have been caught on those tapes and recorders.

It's also a question of whether those tools are illegal - there may be laws against them , but the government can get special permissions

For a wiretap, they'd definitely need a warrant. And I think there was a recent court decision that says that police need a warrant to put a GPS tracker on someone's car. What they did here was to install malware on thousands of machines, without any probable cause to believe that any specific machine owner was involved with child porn. If I understand the law correctly, they would need to obtain a specific warrant for each machine they wanted to search.

Let's say that there was a store in a neighborhood that was known to sell child porn. No judge would sign a warrant that gave police permission to put a GPS device on every car in that neighborhood to track whether they ever visited that store (and they may have visited but bought only legal merchandise). So why is it different if you do it on the internet?

That's a pretty poor analogy.

A better one would be 'Would a judge give a warrant to allow the FBI to place a GPS tracker automatically on everyone who visited a store that was known to sell child porn?'

The answer to that might be yes.

I think my analogy is more accurate. There were many independently owned web sites (stores) hosted at Freedom Hosting (neighborhood), and not all of them carried child porn. You could visit one of the legal sites without even knowing that there was child porn being hosted by Freedom Hosting (or even knowing where the site was being hosted).

From the article:

Freedom Hosting was a provider of turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by sites that need to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – including human rights groups and journalists. But they also appeal to serious criminal elements, child-pornography traders among them.

Cops have been picking locks for as long as both have existed.