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Hang on, just to clarify: if someone else puts a file on my PC without my knowledge, without me ever having seen or opened it, he could call the police on me, a

Hang on, just to clarify: if someone else puts a file on my PC without my knowledge, without me ever having seen or opened it, he could call the police on me, and it would get me convicted?

lutusp 10y ago
> Hang on, just to clarify: if someone else puts a file on my PC without my knowledge, without me ever having seen or opened it, he could call the police on me, and it would get me convicted? Yes. In such a case, a presumption of innocence would be true in theory but of no value at all in practice. Such an attack could even be carried out remotely -- an attacker could compromise a machine remotely, then plant incriminating evidence on the compromised machine (i.e. child porn, terrorist literature, drug-dealing evidence, etc.), then alert the authorities. This plausible scenario is another reason to vigorously protect one's computer against external attacks.
ErrantX 10y ago
I won't say that it doesn't happen (bad outliers always exist); however it would be very unlikely you'd be convicted for it. A few years ago when I worked in computer forensics there was this big myth that if you went on porn websites and one of the images was underage you'd get done for it. However intent is a big part of law and so there would always have to be something along with "just an image" showing some intent to have obtained and viewed it.
nikanj 10y ago
There was a person in Finland mass scraping the alt. newsgroups for porn, and they got some cp on their machine inadvertently. Conviction, publicity and a ruined life promptly followed.
grecy 10y ago
If someone else put 10 kilograms of cocaine in your house without your knowledge, without you ever having seeing or opened it, he could call the police on you and you would get convicted.
- metafunctor 10y ago
  Whatever happened to reasonable doubt, innocent until proven guilty, all that stuff? What kind of court routinely convicts people who didn't actually do the crime?
  - grecy 10y ago
    > who didn't actually do the crime? Possession of narcotics is a crime, isn't it?
    - pauljohncleary 10y ago
      something being on your property is not the same as possessing it
      - ryanmarsh 10y ago
        Tell that to the judge
    - metafunctor 10y ago
      I'm not sure if you're joking or not—but I'm answering anyway. Surely you don't think you should be the one going to prison if someone broke into your house and planted 10 kilograms of cocaine under your mattress?
      - grecy 10y ago
        I'm being serious. > Surely you don't think you should be the one going to prison I don't think you "should" go to prison, but I'm saying that's likely how it would go down. So it's analogous to the files on a computer situation.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - halomru 10y ago
      Possession seems to be a very nebulous concept in English and US law (probably because of their common law systems). In contrast, German law defines possession as "having effective control" (with some more nuance obviously). Possession is also entirely different from ownership in German law. I can not control an object I have no knowledge of. If you place an object in my house, I only gain possession of it once I discover it. I think this is one of the cases where the civil law approach of rigorous definitions is clearly superior to the common law approach of establishing precedent.
revelation 10y ago
They don't even have to call the police. Simply put it in your Dropbox, which can be done from many devices (it's Dropbox after all). Dropbox (and all other "cloud storage" providers) actively scan for CP material and will turn you in to the police automatically.
- pmarreck 10y ago
  I need a link to an instance of this before i will believe it
  - jeffmould 10y ago
    http://fortune.com/2015/12/01/dropbox-child-porn/ http://fortune.com/2015/12/01/dropbox-child-porn/
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    I don't know about Dropbox, but I do know for a fact Facebook and Tumblr definitely do. It might have evolved since a few years ago, but they used a technology from Microsoft called PhotoDNA [0] to hash all uploaded images and match against known signatures of CP and most definitely involved law enforcement when found. [0] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna
J-dawg 10y ago
In the UK, somebody can send you an obscene file over Whatsapp, unsolicited, and get you convicted without you even opening it. [0] We have sleepwalked into being a police state and barely anyone seems to care. Police have also started trawling Reddit to look for thought crimes. [1] [0] http://m.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_conviction/ http://m.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_convicti... [1] https://m.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/53y1wi/a_redditor_was_arrested_and_fined_for_an/ https://m.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/53y1wi/a_reddi...
- kbart 10y ago
  From article no. 0: "<...> police stopped them for unrelated matters and discovered the shock images upon inspecting their mobile phones" What?? So police in UK can now ask to inspect inside your phone without any warrant or even reason?
  - J-dawg 10y ago
    It looks that way. Does anyone know what the UK legal position is about forcing someone to unlock their device? I know you can be jailed here for refusing to hand over an encryption key. I don't know whether your passcode / fingerprint counts as an encryption key in they eyes of the law.
    - kbart 10y ago
      If you refuse to hand over encryption keys in court, after you'd been officially charged that's one thing (though not saying that it's justified either), but if you've been stopped for i.e. mundane traffic check and asked to hand over your phone for inspection, that's totally wrong and oppressive.
- threeseed 10y ago
  You should try reading what you post first. 1. They weren't convicted of any crime. 2. The person was charged because he racially slandered someone. Not because of a thought crime.
kybernetyk 10y ago
At least here in Germany you would have a very hard time proving your innocence.
necessity 10y ago
It's even worse: The police can do it too once they got access to your computer for some other reason: Say, provoking a three letter agency.
- api 10y ago
  Is there actually any nation on Earth where powerful and/or connected people can't screw you over if they really want to and if you have no other powerful or connected people on your side? (and no money, etc.) The thing about this stuff that's really alarming is that any random script kiddie could also do this by coaxing your machine into downloading something. That greatly increases the surface area of people who can screw you. Given the abysmally awful security profile of a lot of consumer software and devices this is very plausible.
  - necessity 10y ago
    It's not a matter of connections, it's a matter of how easy it is for the police to plant evidence. And yes it's a problem worldwide.
omginternets 10y ago
Yes. In US law this is called Absolute Liability. Formally, absolute liability means that a conviction does not hinge on the presence of mens rea. You're likely familiar with this concept in the context of speeding tickets. All that needs to be proven is that you were, in fact, speeding. It doesn't matter if you could not have been aware of your violation due to, say, a speed-limit sign that was blown away by a storm. If you were provably doing 55 in a 45 zone, you have no recourse. The argument for absolute liability with speeding violations is purely practical, I believe. The reasoning is that it's not a crime, per se, so the trade-off of individual protection vs expediency of trials is deemed worthwhile. Clearly, the same is not true of child pornography convictions.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Yes. In US law this is called Absolute Liability. Formally, absolute liability means that a conviction does not hinge on the presence of mens rea. Actually, that's "strict liability". > All that needs to be proven is that you were, in fact, speeding. It doesn't matter if you could not have been aware of your violation due to, say, a speed-limit sign that was blown away by a storm. That probably does matter, since exceeding the speed limit properly posted is usually the actus reus of speeding, so even to the extent it is a strict liability offense, the absence of proper signage for any reason (except when the speed limit is either the states maximum highway speed limit or a default limit for some other condition which does not require signage, in which case notice is provided by the law setting the default for the conditions, and the sign is a reminder) makes it so that no offense occurred. [0] [0] Also, given that states do generally have default speed limits that apply in the absence of signage, one could easily argue that the absence of signage is itself a positive indication that the default speed limit applies, making available a U.S. v. Kantor-style "good faith" defense even under strict-liability principles. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)#Un...
  - omginternets 10y ago
    Thanks for the clarifications. What's the difference between strict liability and absolute liability [0], then? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability

Hang on, just to clarify: if someone else puts a file on my PC without my knowledge, without me ever having seen or opened it, he could call the police on me, and it would get me convicted?

lutusp 10y ago

> Hang on, just to clarify: if someone else puts a file on my PC without my knowledge, without me ever having seen or opened it, he could call the police on me, and it would get me convicted? Yes. In such a case, a presumption of innocence would be true in theory but of no value at all in practice. Such an attack could even be carried out remotely -- an attacker could compromise a machine remotely, then plant incriminating evidence on the compromised machine (i.e. child porn, terrorist literature, drug-dealing evidence, etc.), then alert the authorities. This plausible scenario is another reason to vigorously protect one's computer against external attacks.

ErrantX 10y ago

I won't say that it doesn't happen (bad outliers always exist); however it would be very unlikely you'd be convicted for it. A few years ago when I worked in computer forensics there was this big myth that if you went on porn websites and one of the images was underage you'd get done for it. However intent is a big part of law and so there would always have to be something along with "just an image" showing some intent to have obtained and viewed it.

nikanj 10y ago

There was a person in Finland mass scraping the alt. newsgroups for porn, and they got some cp on their machine inadvertently. Conviction, publicity and a ruined life promptly followed.

grecy 10y ago

If someone else put 10 kilograms of cocaine in your house without your knowledge, without you ever having seeing or opened it, he could call the police on you and you would get convicted.

metafunctor 10y ago
Whatever happened to reasonable doubt, innocent until proven guilty, all that stuff? What kind of court routinely convicts people who didn't actually do the crime?
- grecy 10y ago
  > who didn't actually do the crime? Possession of narcotics is a crime, isn't it?
  - pauljohncleary 10y ago
    something being on your property is not the same as possessing it
    - ryanmarsh 10y ago
      Tell that to the judge
  - metafunctor 10y ago
    I'm not sure if you're joking or not—but I'm answering anyway. Surely you don't think you should be the one going to prison if someone broke into your house and planted 10 kilograms of cocaine under your mattress?
    - grecy 10y ago
      I'm being serious. > Surely you don't think you should be the one going to prison I don't think you "should" go to prison, but I'm saying that's likely how it would go down. So it's analogous to the files on a computer situation.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - halomru 10y ago
    Possession seems to be a very nebulous concept in English and US law (probably because of their common law systems). In contrast, German law defines possession as "having effective control" (with some more nuance obviously). Possession is also entirely different from ownership in German law. I can not control an object I have no knowledge of. If you place an object in my house, I only gain possession of it once I discover it. I think this is one of the cases where the civil law approach of rigorous definitions is clearly superior to the common law approach of establishing precedent.

revelation 10y ago

They don't even have to call the police. Simply put it in your Dropbox, which can be done from many devices (it's Dropbox after all). Dropbox (and all other "cloud storage" providers) actively scan for CP material and will turn you in to the police automatically.

pmarreck 10y ago
I need a link to an instance of this before i will believe it
- jeffmould 10y ago
  http://fortune.com/2015/12/01/dropbox-child-porn/ http://fortune.com/2015/12/01/dropbox-child-porn/
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  I don't know about Dropbox, but I do know for a fact Facebook and Tumblr definitely do. It might have evolved since a few years ago, but they used a technology from Microsoft called PhotoDNA [0] to hash all uploaded images and match against known signatures of CP and most definitely involved law enforcement when found. [0] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna

J-dawg 10y ago

In the UK, somebody can send you an obscene file over Whatsapp, unsolicited, and get you convicted without you even opening it. [0] We have sleepwalked into being a police state and barely anyone seems to care. Police have also started trawling Reddit to look for thought crimes. [1] [0] http://m.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_conviction/ http://m.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_convicti... [1] https://m.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/53y1wi/a_redditor_was_arrested_and_fined_for_an/ https://m.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/53y1wi/a_reddi...

kbart 10y ago
From article no. 0: "<...> police stopped them for unrelated matters and discovered the shock images upon inspecting their mobile phones" What?? So police in UK can now ask to inspect inside your phone without any warrant or even reason?
- J-dawg 10y ago
  It looks that way. Does anyone know what the UK legal position is about forcing someone to unlock their device? I know you can be jailed here for refusing to hand over an encryption key. I don't know whether your passcode / fingerprint counts as an encryption key in they eyes of the law.
  - kbart 10y ago
    If you refuse to hand over encryption keys in court, after you'd been officially charged that's one thing (though not saying that it's justified either), but if you've been stopped for i.e. mundane traffic check and asked to hand over your phone for inspection, that's totally wrong and oppressive.
threeseed 10y ago
You should try reading what you post first. 1. They weren't convicted of any crime. 2. The person was charged because he racially slandered someone. Not because of a thought crime.

kybernetyk 10y ago

At least here in Germany you would have a very hard time proving your innocence.

necessity 10y ago

It's even worse: The police can do it too once they got access to your computer for some other reason: Say, provoking a three letter agency.

api 10y ago
Is there actually any nation on Earth where powerful and/or connected people can't screw you over if they really want to and if you have no other powerful or connected people on your side? (and no money, etc.) The thing about this stuff that's really alarming is that any random script kiddie could also do this by coaxing your machine into downloading something. That greatly increases the surface area of people who can screw you. Given the abysmally awful security profile of a lot of consumer software and devices this is very plausible.
- necessity 10y ago
  It's not a matter of connections, it's a matter of how easy it is for the police to plant evidence. And yes it's a problem worldwide.

omginternets 10y ago

Yes. In US law this is called Absolute Liability. Formally, absolute liability means that a conviction does not hinge on the presence of mens rea. You're likely familiar with this concept in the context of speeding tickets. All that needs to be proven is that you were, in fact, speeding. It doesn't matter if you could not have been aware of your violation due to, say, a speed-limit sign that was blown away by a storm. If you were provably doing 55 in a 45 zone, you have no recourse. The argument for absolute liability with speeding violations is purely practical, I believe. The reasoning is that it's not a crime, per se, so the trade-off of individual protection vs expediency of trials is deemed worthwhile. Clearly, the same is not true of child pornography convictions.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Yes. In US law this is called Absolute Liability. Formally, absolute liability means that a conviction does not hinge on the presence of mens rea. Actually, that's "strict liability". > All that needs to be proven is that you were, in fact, speeding. It doesn't matter if you could not have been aware of your violation due to, say, a speed-limit sign that was blown away by a storm. That probably does matter, since exceeding the speed limit properly posted is usually the actus reus of speeding, so even to the extent it is a strict liability offense, the absence of proper signage for any reason (except when the speed limit is either the states maximum highway speed limit or a default limit for some other condition which does not require signage, in which case notice is provided by the law setting the default for the conditions, and the sign is a reminder) makes it so that no offense occurred. [0] [0] Also, given that states do generally have default speed limits that apply in the absence of signage, one could easily argue that the absence of signage is itself a positive indication that the default speed limit applies, making available a U.S. v. Kantor-style "good faith" defense even under strict-liability principles. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)#Un...
- omginternets 10y ago
  Thanks for the clarifications. What's the difference between strict liability and absolute liability [0], then? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_liability