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News outlets and privacy advocates reacted sharply Tuesday to the revelation that the FBI in 2007 tricked a school-bombing suspect into revealing his whereabouts by getting him to click on a fake Seattle Times Web site link infected with tracking software.

“I feel outraged,” said Kathy Best, editor of the Seattle Times, whose newspaper was mimicked by the FBI to lure the teenage suspect to open the link from an anonymous MySpace profile that was tied to bomb threats.

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“Our reputation is everything,” she said. “If we are to be effective as government watchdogs, people have to trust that we are who we say we are. Without that trust, it makes it a thousand times harder for us to do our job.”

In 2007, FBI sent malware via a link intended to look like a Seattle Times/AP story. eff.org/document/fbici… at pages 61-62. —

Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) October 27, 2014

The disclosure came when American Civil Liberties Union chief technologist Christopher Soghoian on Monday spotted and tweeted out a reference to the ruse in a set of documents obtained in 2011 by another privacy organization under the Freedom of Information Act.