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defrogITEM [via Threat Level]: A federal appeals court upholds the conviction of an Indiana man attempting to proposition underage girls. Which is fine, except that the case has an interesting twist:
The man in question, James Daniel, was busted for chatting up “Amanda_13”, who wasn’t a 13-year-old teenage girl but an undercover Secret Service agent. When agents searched his computer, they found extensive chat logs Daniel had with two other girls.
Turns out those two “girls” were also undercover agents, none of whom knew about the other. Which basically means that Daniel technically never actually succeeded in making online contact with a minor – only with federal agents pretending to be minors.
I’m not saying the guy should be set free based on any of this. It’s just that, after all the hyped up media reports about the teddible, teddible dangers of child molesters hunting down girls on teh social networks (which has long since been put into perspective), I’m just enamored by the idea that the only people left in these teen chat rooms are pedophiles and undercover Treasury agents.
It’s like GK Chesterton wrote the Internet.
On the Internet no one knows yr a cop,
This is dF
The man in question, James Daniel, was busted for chatting up “Amanda_13”, who wasn’t a 13-year-old teenage girl but an undercover Secret Service agent. When agents searched his computer, they found extensive chat logs Daniel had with two other girls.
Turns out those two “girls” were also undercover agents, none of whom knew about the other. Which basically means that Daniel technically never actually succeeded in making online contact with a minor – only with federal agents pretending to be minors.
I’m not saying the guy should be set free based on any of this. It’s just that, after all the hyped up media reports about the teddible, teddible dangers of child molesters hunting down girls on teh social networks (which has long since been put into perspective), I’m just enamored by the idea that the only people left in these teen chat rooms are pedophiles and undercover Treasury agents.
It’s like GK Chesterton wrote the Internet.
On the Internet no one knows yr a cop,
This is dF
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no subject
on 2009-08-25 12:05 am (UTC)That's because chat rooms are so 1997.