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Comment by bowmessage | Hacker News Reader

Really worried about what the authorities might find in his 30TB of 4chan backups. Hoping for the best outcome for them.

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It doesn't actually matter, unless he's KNOWS he's downloaded something illegal and KNOWS how to find it on his computer, or has opened it already and not deleted it.

Basically all possession laws (really all laws in general) require some sort of knowledge and intent. Just like you can't be convicted for possession of drugs if they were stuck to the bottom of your shoe when you came out of a club (don't actually try this), you can't be convicted with possession of illegal digital material if you weren't aware you were in possession of it.

I did digital forensic work at an old job and one of the cases was someone who liked to indiscriminately download huge amounts of porn off dodgy p2p applications. We found gigabytes of indecent images of children, but no searches in the p2p application for commonly used IIoC terms, and no evidence that he'd either opened the folders containing the IIoC or actually viewed any of it. Police gave his hard drives back (after wiping them ofc) and let him go.

I wouldn't be concerned about his 4chan backups, any lawyer will be able to get him off the hook for anything illegal in there provided he hasn't actually opened it.

> Basically all possession laws (really all laws in general) require some sort of knowledge and intent. Just like you can't be convicted for possession of drugs if they were stuck to the bottom of your shoe when you came out of a club...

Clearly not all laws in general: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=188420...

Fun fact: in Germany possession of child porn is illegal even if you're unaware of it. If you find child porn in your e-mail inbox technically you have to report yourself to the police for possession of child pornography.

Yes, that seems extremely exploitable. No, I don't know if anyone has ever weaponised child porn this way. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened (and worked) though.

Ugh, this comment has reminded me of the disgusting dystopian fascist police state we find ourselves in; I immediately thought, "I'm sorry, but Mr. Deitrich's dead. I thought they'd arrest him, but when they found a Koran in his house, they had him executed."

I thought you were going to quote "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."

Exactly. Why did this kid admit that? How astronomcally low are the odds there's nothing illegal to possess in there?

He's a 19 year old kid, not a criminal mastermind

There's quite a bit of child pornography that has graced the pages of 4chan over the years.

"How astronomcally low are the odds there's nothing illegal to possess in there?"

That is a haunting reflection of the state of affairs with regards to information and laws regarding information. Criminalizing the mere possession of information should be a tool only of the despotic and/or idiotic.

Of course, these clowns left "private" information accessible by public urls without identification, so we know that they're at least idiots.

As the amount of 4chan material you've archived increases the probability of not archiving something illegal quickly diminishes to zero.

Depending on the boards archived there's a pretty good chance he doesn't have CP. Only /b/ (and I hear /sp/ as well but I never go there) really ever have child porn, and then very very rarely and quickly deleted to the point that an archiver might not pick it up. Due to the sheer size and uselessness of a possible /b/ archive I kind of doubt there's anything bad.

If his archive was automated it's basically guaranteed he's saved a fair bit of loli content. Not sure of the legality in Canada, but this is seems like a case where they'd railroad you for something they normally don't enforce, e.g., Chris Handley in the states.

CP would not be unlikely even if he just archived "safe" boards like /a/, /tv/, and /g/.

If he's scraping the softcore or hardcore boards (because nobody's archiving 4chan for its intellectual discussions), he's absolutely going to have more than a few under-18 subjects in there doing sexually explicit things. If the state can verify the age and identity of any of them, he's toast.

>nobody's scraping 4chan for its intellectual discussions You'd be surprised. There's quite a few archives out there just for keeping up board history and discussions.

>because nobody's archiving 4chan for its intellectual discussions

There's plenty of good discussion as long as you stay away from /b/, /v/, and the porn boards.

/diy/ always has interesting projects. /g/ seems to be the one tech board on the internet that takes consumer privacy seriously (Even HackerNews seems to give Microsoft a free pass in this regard)

Fun fact: in Germany even "lolicon" (i.e. sexual drawings of prepubescent characters) count as child pornography and as far as I know they're tolerated on /b/.

I'm hoping Canadian laws treat this differently but if he were German and they found anything like that in his archive, he'd be facing child pornography possession charges.

The more systematic your collection the better your defense will be.

Intent and knowledge of the illegal material of which you are in possession could easily be a requirement.

I'm no laywer, but archiving the internet is hardly illegal.

> I'm no lawyer, but archiving the internet is hardly illegal.

Tell that to the part of the law enforcement that decided to arrest this kid for accessing a public website.

If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.

My stomach dropped when I read that line in the article. I imagine the cops will drop these charges, but I'll be amazed if they don't try to pin something else on him.

On a differnt note, is this level of backup a common thing?

30TB is a stupid amount of anything for any one person -- I've always used wayback if I wanted to see an old page

A very good friend of mine used to obsessively back up and catalog music and books. He had all the local bands and artists well organized and preserved for posterity. Once he had a computer he started to do similar things digitally. Some people are just into it.

I wish I'd done that with a lot of the indie music and otherwise unpopular things I was interested in years ago. There's a particular album I wish I could find and listen to, but I've only ever been able to find one article talking about it, all links dead, and that itself was long enough ago that I've forgotten the name of the album and band.

I had a lot of things saved through Instapaper right from its inception, but I stopped using it regularly and one day when I went back I didn't appear to have anything saved anymore.

Since then, I've been much quicker to download things I might want in the future. Storage is cheap, archaeological effort is not.

Here's an entire forum of them on reddit, it's called /r/datahorder.

I love that sub.

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