The Achilles Heel of those watching or downloading child porn online is the credit cards or PayPal accounts they use to pay for them. The FBI recently snared US diplomatic security officer James Charles Cafferty after finding he’d paid for child porn websites through PayPal.
They want to see if Cafferty was still going to such sites so they sent him an email with supposed password access to child porn. The entire site was a trap and made it abundantly clear that once you enter and click to download a video, that you will get child porn. But the site had no porn and the download would appear to fail because of connectivity problems. It would also track your IP address.
Last Thursday, Cafferty was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for clicking one link to download a video. He confessed when arrested and police found 30,000 child porn files on his computers.
This was probably not entrapment because the FBI honeypot made it clear the site was about child porn. But still, this is akin to catching a drug user while the distributors and manufacturers of the drugs continue.
One thing is for sure here, the feds have no trouble getting any information they want from PayPal, Yahoo, Facebook, whoever.
“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” – Sun CEO Scott McNealy, 1999.