Thanks for the background, but somebody has to say it: his failure was looking at child pornography.
FTFY
It doesn't matter what they accuse him of, until they prove it, he's innocent.
I don't care what the charge is, if the government can not prove their case without compelling the person to testify / provide evidence against himself the judge needs to throw that case out. This is terrifying that anyone could be jailed for using what anyone would consider their 5th amendment right.
But we're not a court, and our standard for speech shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". The parent poster was right. His failing was looking at child pornography.
There's a procedure though that we use to determine the likelihood of someone's guilt, based on evidence and legal arguments. Would you like to hear about it?
That said, as far as I'm aware the only evidence we've seen is that he's been accused of the crime. I don't what portion of accusations are false (or even a proxy like conviction rate in comparable situations).
That is, you are effectively dealing with punishment (by treating a suspect as a criminal and tarnishing their reputation before being convicted) by not applying the same rigour as the courts.
Tread carefully. The protections you give others are the protections you'll enjoy yourself if needed. And hoping you'll never need them is a very shortsighted strategy.
That's what you think until you're falsely accused of such a crime...
Now, replace child pornography with any other thing. Would you question me saying that he'd been downloading that thing?
- That the viewer of adult porn shouldn't be prosecuted for viewing porn.
or
- That there is a societal / governmental acceptance of the exploitation of men and women, as long as they are adults.
The easy argument out of this hypocrisy is to claim that while children can never consent, adults can, but then that opens the can of worms of whether they're "consenting" under coercion, like under threat of not getting hired again to do work or if they're enslaved, and the answer to that is that it depends on the case.
At this point it turns political, with one side generalizing that most do consent, and another side also generalizing that most do not consent, and reaching an agreement is impossible because there is a half-truth to both sides, and after a lot of heated arguments, people get worn out, and nothing gets resolved.
So instead I'm just going to direct people to read up on the topic of victimology, which is a sub-genre of criminology, specifically how it affects human traffic (which are >90% women, and has a total volume of enslaved people higher than it was when slavery was legal) and get informed and then make up their own mind about it without bothering others.
Welcome to 2017.
It's one of the first strategies in the book of shutting down your opposition and probably was one of the first things people tried the moment discussions started.
Furthermore, there is presumably enough existing child pornography out there to satiate any viewer for their entire life. Perhaps increasing access to it is the way to discourage more being made! At any rate, paying for it could still be a crime, as opposed to the insanity of strict liability for bitstring possession.
Not necessarily, and even so, can it be proven?
If then that video was sold (or distributed in any way) to fetishists of dog beheading I could conclude that there is some kind of commercial (distribution) process going on here.
Note for children: I'm using parenthesis in a way that shouldn't be done.
Edit: In my opinion, the following offences ought to exist with relation to child pornography and abuse:
(1) Child abuse is an offence as it currently stands, or with revised ages of consent to better reflect philosophical, scientific and psychological evidence (2) The act of recording of abuse with majority or express intention of furnishing the material for charge or otherwise in order finance or encourage continuing abuse is an offence
I think the second part needs some elaboration. I don't think that recording a certain act taking place ought to be illegal, nor I do I think it ought to be illegal to share that material with others. However this presents a dilemma: the abuse may be encouraged by the fact that the material is being sold or even enjoyed. If this encouragement to continue abuse can indeed be proven in a court of law, by some standard deemed appropriate (either the standard 'beyond a reasonable doubt' or the more strict 'balance of probabilities') then the act of making the recording and the act of furnishing the recording, I believe, ought to be an offence.
On the other hand, if the recordings are made merely to provide the enjoyment of others, and not for the purpose of encouraging abuse, I do not think there should be an offence.
At the risk of over-emphasising the point: A child abuser may be encouraged by (i) money (ii) the thought that people are watching the recording (there may be further motivations).
If it can be proven that abuse continued and the abuse was contingent on one or more of these factors, there is sufficient reason to believe that the intent of the recordings aided another crime, which I think may be sufficient to culminate in an offence.
And if obtaining and distributing the output material of a content industry without payment is supporting the industry, let that be put in writing…
0) http://livinginsaudiarabia.org/73/pornography-in-saudi-arabi...
"Innocent until proven guilty" is the foundation of our legal system
Here (Sydney Australia) the penalty for refusing a roadside alcohol test is the same as the top range blood alcohol penalty. So you can refuse a test, and they'll penalise you assuming the worst-case result you could have produced.
I'm guessing this guy is in a quite perplexing quandary - he's betting on whether they'll keep him in jail for as long for refusing to decrypt the drives as they would for the crimes that decrypting the drives expose?
(At least I _hope_ that's his quandary - I sincerely hope the reality isn't that he's genuinely forgotten the passwords, and when the FBI/NSA _finally_ bruteforce it, they end up with baby photos, teenaged angst poetry, and a few bittorrented Hollywood movies... That does, at least, seem quite unlikely...)
It is quite a quandary :(
Might not help him if they believe that the encrypted keyless fragments is enough (which would be a horrible legal argument).
But LEA are selecting nodes based on the hashes of those fragments. Many of them won't have cached CP fragments, but merely relayed them. But if his node did, prosecutors could argue that they've identified CP on his computer based on hashes, and have experts testify about reliability, etc. How many jurors would understand Freenet design?
In fact, it seems dangerous for the judge to be able to jail anyone without a jury verdict. It seems to bypass legal protections.
The standard is not "100% proof". Perhaps you should learn something about the legal system.
Not even close.
Oh, but you see, little Timmy was actually being telepathically controlled by a diabetic alien about to pass out from hypoglycemia, who had him steal the candy bar. Can you prove this was not the case?
This is what reasonable doubt protects against. There will always be the ability to create a (probably fanciful) scenario in which the defendant is not guilty. An unreasonable scenario, one might even say. Being able to convince the jury beyond reasonable doubt is as close to 100% proof as you are reasonably going to ever get.
> Beyond "the shadow of a doubt" is sometimes used interchangeably with beyond reasonable doubt, but this extends beyond the latter, to the extent that it may be considered an impossible standard. The term "reasonable doubt" is therefore used. [Emphasis mine]
If you want to insist that "100% proof" and reasonable doubt are the same, that's of course your choice. I think you'll find that people will tend to disagree with you.
"I doubt that, because a fairy whispered something to me in my sleep."
While a personal hard drive full of child porn is unlikely to be "innocently" explained away quite that easily, I wonder if owners of, say, usenet binary hosting newsservers ever need to claim that defence?
We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of "the people" to check these agencies' ambitions.
Didn't it go further than this? Just searching the data for some signal wasn't a "search" because a machine did it, it was only a "search" if you were a match and if you were a match then they had "probable cause" for the search.
Not entirely sure how accurate that is but FWIW it seemed like that was the accepted reading of the twisted reasoning on HN back when that came out.