Philosophical question about reporting questionable web content (email, server, click)

[Randomdude]

Im not sure this is the best forum for this, but I was in a discussion the other day about reporting questionable internet content.

My argument was this, there are a number of places you can report stuff to, some non profits, the FBI, local law enforcement, etc.

Say you are surfing along, or you open your email, and click on a link you think is one thing, or described as one thing, and you end up at an objectionable website, or maybe your computer got hijacked and sent you that way. Some of these sites (non profits/FBI) will urge you to report these finds, so that they may forward the information to proper law enforcement/investigate.

Here is the thing, from what I understand, the minute you hit that questionable web site, a whole bunch of temp internet files are created, including images, cookies, blah blah. Also from what I understand, government agencies have the ability to forensically recover items that were deleted and even over written/reformatted. Finally, I believe people have been actually tried and convicted on little more then the recovery of deleted temp internet files.

So, what is the motivation for a person to report such sites if they ended up landing on them? Wouldnt the simple fact they reported a site almost be probable cause to search the reporter, and the fact that they were on the site at all, likely gathering enough temp internet content be enough to convict them?

[thecoalman]

I think if you're being honest you don't have anything to worry about. Certainly if law enforcement started doing that people would not be willing to report it and that would ultimately be detrimental to future investigations.

Good points though about actually getting into trouble through no fault of your own. Certainly possible.

Originally Posted by Randomdude

Also from what I understand, government agencies have the ability to forensically recover items that were deleted and even over written/reformatted.

Recovery of deleted files or on a reformatted drive is possible, even if you wanted to do it yourself. Recovery of overwritten data is a stretch. Most of the security software will overwite it numerous times. To suggest it could be recovered would suggest a drive could hold an infinite amount of data. I did read an article recently in regards to recovery on an atomic level but I believe that was theory and certainly not something common in law enforcement even it were possible.

Where people do get into trouble with overwritten data is the slack space. You're drive is divided up into clusters and each cluster can have X amount data within it. Two files cannot be writtien to the same cluster so if you have 4kb clusters and write 1 5kb file you do have not overwritten all the data in the cluster. This can result in partial recovery of files.

The better security wiping applications will wipe this slack space too.

[NHDave]

Reporting it does nothing, if one server gets taken down, another will replace it, it's a trivial matter to relocate offensive material and keep it online. Not to mention there are no international laws, and much of the stuff you see isn't in the US, thus there's nothing the FBI or any US agency can do about it.