The morons at the FBI have threatened to criminally sue Wikipedia because it has an image of the FBI seal on its web page about the federal agency.
The FBI claimed that federal law prohibits anyone from possessing any insignia of the agency.
As quickly pointed out by Wikipedia’s lawyers, there is no such federal law. The statute at issue prevents anyone from displaying a fake badge to fraudulently deceive someone into believing that they are an FBI agent.
No one would believe that the Wikipedia website is an FBI agent. I’m not either. In fact, I would be insulted if someone believed that I was one of the inept and incompetent attorneys working for the FBI who sent the threat to Wikipedia.
The letter from the FBI also claimed that the purpose of the seal is to “authenticate the official communications and actions of the FBI.” So? Where does that preclude anyone from displaying the seal so that we know what it looks like. So we in fact know what the official FBI seal looks like?
To help educate the public, posted below is what the official FBI seal looks like. If you see something else from someone claiming to be the FBI, be suspicious.
Here is a high resolution image of the FBI seal that the FBI has had posted on their website since 2005:
Source: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/financial/fcs_report052005/fcs_report052005.htm
Here is another one, also posted by the FBI on its public domain website. Conveniently, the FBI titled the image “fbiseal.gif”.
Source: http://norfolk.fbi.gov/images/fbiseal.gif
According to a image search on Google for ‘FBI seal’ – there are at least 228,000 pictures of the FBI seal floating around.
And new ones are being posted all the time. Such as the one just posted by the New York Times.
Enough to give the FBI lawyers a lifetime job filing lawsuits!
Dear FBI, after you get your butts kicked by Wikipedia, feel free to sue me too (and don’t forget to sue the New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, and hundreds of thousands of others). Just make sure you’re prepared for the inevitable malicious prosecution lawsuit and result from seeking to prohibit my First Amendment rights.
— Update – November 2010:
The Smoking Gun has published an article with the FBI seal prominently shown:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/internet/fbi-targets-young-russian-spam-kingpin
Still waiting for the FBI to sue Wikipedia. But here ya go feds, you can also sue The Smoking Gun.
Because if the US FBI didn’t have enough to do, uselessly investigating a RUSSIAN 23-year old (living in Russia and not coming to the US anytime soon) for spam, they can get busy filing FBI seal lawsuits.
But since this is my tax money – hello, FBI, go find some terrorists.
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