Entrapment and all the related legal discussions aside: there's a purely technical problem with the data used as evidence: no referrer data was collected.
In other words, the IP logs that the FBI is using only really indicate that someone followed a link. No information about link body text, alt text, title attributes can be inferred from these logs without any indication of context. The URL's themselves look pretty bad as well, but the evidence data doesn't really indicate what the user saw when they clicked the URL.
On top of this a whole host of issues around prefetching and content crawling could be raised, but I'm not even going there. But then it seems that probable cause is a pretty low barrier, so maybe you don't need much incriminating evidence anyway.
From the article:
"When anyone visited the upload.sytes.net site, the FBI recorded the Internet Protocol address of the remote computer. There's no evidence the referring site was recorded as well, meaning the FBI couldn't tell if the visitor found the links through Ranchi or another source such as an e-mail message."
In other words, the IP logs that the FBI is using only really indicate that someone followed a link. No information about link body text, alt text, title attributes can be inferred from these logs without any indication of context. The URL's themselves look pretty bad as well, but the evidence data doesn't really indicate what the user saw when they clicked the URL.
On top of this a whole host of issues around prefetching and content crawling could be raised, but I'm not even going there. But then it seems that probable cause is a pretty low barrier, so maybe you don't need much incriminating evidence anyway.
From the article: "When anyone visited the upload.sytes.net site, the FBI recorded the Internet Protocol address of the remote computer. There's no evidence the referring site was recorded as well, meaning the FBI couldn't tell if the visitor found the links through Ranchi or another source such as an e-mail message."