Oh noes! Apparently The Pirate Bay has fallen into enemy hands and is now an FBI-run honeypot gathering data on the pirate masses. Fortunately and despite some big publications picking up on the 'story' this week, people can rest easy. TPB is not a trap and even if it was, it wouldn't be a very good one.

When confronted with an outrageous story this week our immediate thoughts were to ignore it in the hope that it would quickly go away. Sadly that isn’t how things have played out.

Faced with the fantastic and outrageous proposition that The Pirate Bay’s return was facilitated by United States’ authorities keen to position the site as an FBI-run honeypot, the temptation to regurgitate the ‘news’ was just too great for several big publications.

As the week progressed, more and more sites reported on the doomsday scenario with varying levels of excitement and belief. For our part we dismissed the story as nonsense. But with Sunday here and time on our hands, let’s pretend that the allegations are true and that the FBI has indeed commandeered the world’s most notorious torrent site.

Operation Swedish Massage

After water-boarding login information out of the site’s former admin, Special Agent Phil Share takes control of TPB and begins gathering evidence on millions of users. The data volumes involved quickly become unwieldy. The site can log IP addresses but there’s only so many the feds can process. The feds start incurring expensive overtime pay and those holding the purse strings become unhappy.

IP address bonanza

In the face of rising costs, Agent Share has to justify the overtime to his seniors. He finds it extremely difficult. While he does indeed have every IP address of every person visiting the site, obstacles are many.

First, he has no idea who these people are without obtaining their details from their ISPs. Second, and perhaps most importantly, he can only produce a subpoena after reasonably showing that these people have committed an offense.

Then it dawns on him: browsing a website – even The Pirate Bay – is not a crime. He has millions of IP addresses but zero proof that any have committed any offenses, even those that download .torrent files from the site. There has to be another way.

The Pirate Bay is just the beginning

Eventually our friendly Special Agent comes to realize that if he wants evidence of infringement he’ll need to spread his wings a little. Sure, his access to The Pirate Bay databases may give him the IP and email addresses of the minority who signed up for an account, and that could even include information on big uploaders, but the former aren’t of much interest and the latter tend to hide their identities anyway.

No, proof of actual infringement is needed here and for that he’s going to need to connect to outside trackers or DHT, the mechanisms through which peers in torrent swarms are able to find each other and the content being shared. He heads back to his boss to ask for more resources and more money. He gets it.

Getting closer

With fistfuls of crisp dollars in hand, Special Agent Share starts exploring public trackers in order to find the IP addresses of people sharing illegal content. At last, here is the goldmine he’s been looking for. Over the course of the next few weeks he collects the IP addresses of individuals sharing infringing content and goes to court to obtain a subpoena against their ISPs. He’s now within reach of obtaining their identities.

More money please

With his project so near to completion, our Agent requests more funds to finally unveil the perpetrators. Just before signing off on yet more cash, the FBI’s chief purse-string controller asks: “These are Pirate Bay users, right?”

“Some are but not necessarily all,” he responds. “I pulled the data from a public tracker used by the site.”

Two words in the sentence interest the spy-funding accountant. “Public tracker?” he questions. “Aren’t those publicly available resources that ANYONE can get information from for FREE?”

“Yes sir,” Share confirms.

“And we needed The Pirate Bay for what exactly?” the accountant responds.

The Special Agent’s career flashes before his eyes. Then it hits him.

“To scare the shit out of the Internet sir?????????”

“You’re fired,” came the response. “They do that themselves. FOR FREE.”