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Possession of this type of image is a federal crime in the US.[1] When I took a digital forensics course about five years ago, we were told that if we ever disc

Possession of this type of image is a federal crime in the US.[1] When I took a digital forensics course about five years ago, we were told that if we ever discovered any on a system we were investigating, it needed to be reported to the FBI immediately or we could also be charged. If someone does this in a way that goes unnoticed, and it's discovered after long enough that rolling back is impractical, does that effectively kill the blockchain where the data is embedded, at least as far as the US and countries with similar laws are concerned? [1] https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-child-pornography https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...

gjs278 8y ago
you better report this now or else you’ll go to jail, right?
Tepix 8y ago
Related: What's the smallest piece of data that qualifies? Can a 16x16 image be illegal? What about a 64x64 image? What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image?
- anotheryou 8y ago
  Taking your last step further: Is any half illegal? Or only the one created at a later date? Reminds me of the library of babel https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrdag,jmlr44 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrd...
  - giornogiovanna 8y ago
    Well either half is utterly meaningless without the other, and could actually be arbitrary, right? So you'd have to have them both together for it to be illegal.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      What about an encrypted image? The encrypted data is meaningless without the key, so do they have to be put together for it to be illegal? I imagine for someone that doesn't know what's in the file, and doesn't have the the key, it's likely not illegal? For someone that doesn't know what's in the file and does have the key, it probably is, since I think it's about possession, and likely the same for those that know what it is and have they key. But for people that do know what it is and don't have the key? What about that? What about if they don't have the key, but know how to easily get it if they want?
- duxup 8y ago
  There was an artist that had these very low resolution pieces of at that up close looked like just some colored blocks.... but at a distance looked suggestive / pornographic (just gonna use that word and not worry about exact definitions here). It was interesting.... so is the image suggestive then, or isn't it?
  - trentlott 8y ago
    I think it comes down to whether we make illegal the creation/possession of images which do not require an existing physical subject - eg cartoon porn. If we allow all cartoon porn because nobody has been victimized, then the above scenario is more simple - does the image originate from or use as its input an image requiring the suffering/exploitation of a non-consenting party? This would cover fancy image-hiding methods because you would presumably run a script on some extant photo. You also wouldn't be able to paint your own copy of an abuse photo and claim artistry. You could also say "all images of abuse, real or imagined", but Australia has shown that legislating thought-only is unproductive. It also wouldn't give much extra social benefit over a less restrictive real-only law.
    - duxup 8y ago
      Yeah the "any imagery" laws just fall into the absurd so quickly that it seems unworkable.
      - trentlott 8y ago
        Right. And then it has to be clarified that sex is evil but violence is fine, or we have to declare as a society that writing Batman is a crime.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  Like most things, there isn't a magical number, and the notion that there should be (or that there is, but not codified) is a dream that tech people would have to imagine how the world works. They think they outsmart the law with various technicalities and hypothetical solutions - but in the end it comes down to a judge's interpretation, and no amount of "well actually"ing will get you around that. So you might think "a 16x16 image can be illegal?! ridiculous!" - well tough, the law doesn't care about how many pixels the image contains, despite a hacker's incredulity.
  - losvedir 8y ago
    Related: The excellent What colour are your bits? [0] [0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - klipt 8y ago
    Well as a non pedophile I have no desire to possess child porn, but I also don't want to be framed or blackmailed over innocent data that becomes illegal under some technicality like "when xor'd with the blackmailer's carefully constructed data this becomes child porn" - because the latter could happen to anyone?
    - claudiawerner 8y ago
      That's an issue that's mostly irrelevant to the law, though. Even if you were to receive XOR'd data (or something encrypted), simple possession wouldn't be illegal if you reasonably weren't aware that it could be interpreted that way, or (as someone else pointed out) at least in the UK you didn't have the "knowledge or tools" for such a decryption. Intent obviously matters here, among a host of other factors. That was really my point all along - viewing this as detached from the actual workings of the law and situations is a fun mind game for hackers, but is ultimately irrelevant when it comes to human judges interpreting human laws.
- lucozade 8y ago
  > Can a 16x16 image be illegal? In theory yes, in practice probably not. > What about a 64x64 image? In theory yes, in practice probably not. > What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data ... Almost definitely illegal.
- gst 8y ago
  > What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image? That's an interesting legal question and there's also already a content publishing system (Publius) that afaik uses a similar approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_(publishing_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_(publishing_system) Let's assume person A publishes 1 MiB of random data on their web server. Afterwards person B XORs illegal content against that data and publishes the result on their own web server (which to an outsider looks like random data). A's file XORed to B's file re-creates that illegal content. Let's assume that at a later point it's not possible anymore to determine who published their file first. Who is liable for the illegal content? And who needs to remove that data from their server? Neither of them? Both of them? The first variant definitely sounds wrong, but the second variant implies that you can get in trouble for publishing perfectly random data.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    I think it may cloud how the Feds pursue a production or a distribution charge. The issue in the US is that simple possession, in and of itself, is illegal. Whether the images are encrypted, xor or base64 encoded, steganographically hidden, whatever, if they are in your possession, and you don't report them, you're guilty of possession. And here's the thing in the US, not only the producers of the content are guilty of the possession, but everyone who has a storage device with that content stored on it is guilty of possession. You can try to trickety-trick the Feds, but with that particular charge, you're not gonna get out of it. Don't try to outsmart the law on something like this. The best thing to do is to find a way technologically to remove this content from blockchains, and to report whoever had it or created it.
    - johnwyles 8y ago
      This comment is why I came to comment myself. You cannot remove these types of things once they are baked in they are there for good unless there is some very complex math involved in somehow safely removing or flagging this section of the blockchain but then that would defeat the purpose of the whole cryptographically secure nature of it. Second is you can stomp down on websites that search the blockchain for text, images, videos, illegal documents, etc. However that is not solving the issue directly. However that is hurting a lot of positive potentially interesting uses on account of the very small percentage of abuses. What you essentially have is a GIANT public whiteboard but you've given everyone a permanent marker. If you can control the content that goes in very directly (doing some AI analysis on photos for example) then there will always be a subversive tactic like the XOR one mentioned above, etc. I suppose the real reason I comment here is that I cannot forsee anyway that these things will not happen and will not continue to happen. Like with ThePirateBay I suppose you have to go after the sites that make it convenient to find this information rather than trying to solve the problem in the blockchain itself _somehow_, which I think we can pretty much agree from a security standpoint and tech-forward approach would render the whole concept of blockchain dubious.
- kbenson 8y ago
  What if we took different size sliding windows, and moved them across a large dataset, and fed the resulting chunks to a pornographic image detector to look for what is likely a completely random set of data that can be re-interpreted as pornographic (or more importantly, illegal in some manner)? How much does creation matter compared to existence, compared to use? Does a formation of clouds or rocks that looks a certain way also fall under this category? With regard to illegal child pornography, I'm sure it has a lot to do with the wording of the law, but I think the intersection of how laws are defined and how they may conflict with the natural world (including randomness) is itself interesting.
- mayniac 8y ago
  Apologies in advance for the long-winded answer to what looks like a simple question. >Can a 16x16 image be illegal? >What about a 64x64 image? Depends on the case. If you could show the 64x64 image of child abuse to a stranger and they'd go "that's child abuse" (repeat x12 for a jury) then yes. However, there's another aspect of possession charges that says the suspect has to be aware they're in possession of an illegal image and able to access it. A 64x64 image is problematic, nobody watches anything in 64p so the only time you would see such a small image is thumbnails. If someone has an illegal image in a thumbs.db file, but they have since deleted the original full-sized image, they likely don't know a thumbnail of the image was being kept on their hard drive. And if they don't know how to extract images from the thumbs.db file they're not in possession. The interesting loophole in UK law is that you can get charged for "creating" indecent images of children. Popular belief is that it means creating new images but it more often than not refers to creating copies. In the case I mentioned, they could still get arrested for creating a 64x64 copy of the illegal image as a thumbnail. And you can usually prove that they knowingly did something that would trigger the creation of the thumbnail (downloaded the image from a dodgy P2P application 99% of the time). So to answer this: >What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image? It's complicated. Mainly because it's hard to tell who the "you" is in this situation. But assuming someone is accused of downloading both chunks of data, yes it would be illegal if the person involved knew how to XOR them to get the illegal image. The specific term in UK law is "tools or knowledge". So someone with decades of experience in anything compsci might not have to have any programs capable of XORing the two chunks together if the prosecution can prove they had the knowledge to do so using standard OS tools or write their own script/program. Really XORing is no different than encryption, you've basically just described a one-time pad. And in any cases involving encryption if you can prove that the person possessing encrypted illegal images had either decrypted them in the past, or has the capability to decrypt them (knows the password, has a keyfile, or can bruteforce) then they're legally in possession. If they had XOR'd the two chunks together already there would likely be a copy somewhere in slack space/unallocated sectors and that would be creation. In the end it would come down to a huge number of factors specific to the case.
SamReidHughes 8y ago
You can update the program to special-case those blocks, with old hash values and replacement hash values.

gjs278 8y ago

you better report this now or else you’ll go to jail, right?

Tepix 8y ago

Related: What's the smallest piece of data that qualifies? Can a 16x16 image be illegal? What about a 64x64 image? What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image?

anotheryou 8y ago
Taking your last step further: Is any half illegal? Or only the one created at a later date? Reminds me of the library of babel https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrdag,jmlr44 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrd...
- giornogiovanna 8y ago
  Well either half is utterly meaningless without the other, and could actually be arbitrary, right? So you'd have to have them both together for it to be illegal.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    What about an encrypted image? The encrypted data is meaningless without the key, so do they have to be put together for it to be illegal? I imagine for someone that doesn't know what's in the file, and doesn't have the the key, it's likely not illegal? For someone that doesn't know what's in the file and does have the key, it probably is, since I think it's about possession, and likely the same for those that know what it is and have they key. But for people that do know what it is and don't have the key? What about that? What about if they don't have the key, but know how to easily get it if they want?
duxup 8y ago
There was an artist that had these very low resolution pieces of at that up close looked like just some colored blocks.... but at a distance looked suggestive / pornographic (just gonna use that word and not worry about exact definitions here). It was interesting.... so is the image suggestive then, or isn't it?
- trentlott 8y ago
  I think it comes down to whether we make illegal the creation/possession of images which do not require an existing physical subject - eg cartoon porn. If we allow all cartoon porn because nobody has been victimized, then the above scenario is more simple - does the image originate from or use as its input an image requiring the suffering/exploitation of a non-consenting party? This would cover fancy image-hiding methods because you would presumably run a script on some extant photo. You also wouldn't be able to paint your own copy of an abuse photo and claim artistry. You could also say "all images of abuse, real or imagined", but Australia has shown that legislating thought-only is unproductive. It also wouldn't give much extra social benefit over a less restrictive real-only law.
  - duxup 8y ago
    Yeah the "any imagery" laws just fall into the absurd so quickly that it seems unworkable.
    - trentlott 8y ago
      Right. And then it has to be clarified that sex is evil but violence is fine, or we have to declare as a society that writing Batman is a crime.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
claudiawerner 8y ago
Like most things, there isn't a magical number, and the notion that there should be (or that there is, but not codified) is a dream that tech people would have to imagine how the world works. They think they outsmart the law with various technicalities and hypothetical solutions - but in the end it comes down to a judge's interpretation, and no amount of "well actually"ing will get you around that. So you might think "a 16x16 image can be illegal?! ridiculous!" - well tough, the law doesn't care about how many pixels the image contains, despite a hacker's incredulity.
- losvedir 8y ago
  Related: The excellent What colour are your bits? [0] [0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- klipt 8y ago
  Well as a non pedophile I have no desire to possess child porn, but I also don't want to be framed or blackmailed over innocent data that becomes illegal under some technicality like "when xor'd with the blackmailer's carefully constructed data this becomes child porn" - because the latter could happen to anyone?
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    That's an issue that's mostly irrelevant to the law, though. Even if you were to receive XOR'd data (or something encrypted), simple possession wouldn't be illegal if you reasonably weren't aware that it could be interpreted that way, or (as someone else pointed out) at least in the UK you didn't have the "knowledge or tools" for such a decryption. Intent obviously matters here, among a host of other factors. That was really my point all along - viewing this as detached from the actual workings of the law and situations is a fun mind game for hackers, but is ultimately irrelevant when it comes to human judges interpreting human laws.
lucozade 8y ago
> Can a 16x16 image be illegal? In theory yes, in practice probably not. > What about a 64x64 image? In theory yes, in practice probably not. > What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data ... Almost definitely illegal.
gst 8y ago
> What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image? That's an interesting legal question and there's also already a content publishing system (Publius) that afaik uses a similar approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_(publishing_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_(publishing_system) Let's assume person A publishes 1 MiB of random data on their web server. Afterwards person B XORs illegal content against that data and publishes the result on their own web server (which to an outsider looks like random data). A's file XORed to B's file re-creates that illegal content. Let's assume that at a later point it's not possible anymore to determine who published their file first. Who is liable for the illegal content? And who needs to remove that data from their server? Neither of them? Both of them? The first variant definitely sounds wrong, but the second variant implies that you can get in trouble for publishing perfectly random data.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I think it may cloud how the Feds pursue a production or a distribution charge. The issue in the US is that simple possession, in and of itself, is illegal. Whether the images are encrypted, xor or base64 encoded, steganographically hidden, whatever, if they are in your possession, and you don't report them, you're guilty of possession. And here's the thing in the US, not only the producers of the content are guilty of the possession, but everyone who has a storage device with that content stored on it is guilty of possession. You can try to trickety-trick the Feds, but with that particular charge, you're not gonna get out of it. Don't try to outsmart the law on something like this. The best thing to do is to find a way technologically to remove this content from blockchains, and to report whoever had it or created it.
  - johnwyles 8y ago
    This comment is why I came to comment myself. You cannot remove these types of things once they are baked in they are there for good unless there is some very complex math involved in somehow safely removing or flagging this section of the blockchain but then that would defeat the purpose of the whole cryptographically secure nature of it. Second is you can stomp down on websites that search the blockchain for text, images, videos, illegal documents, etc. However that is not solving the issue directly. However that is hurting a lot of positive potentially interesting uses on account of the very small percentage of abuses. What you essentially have is a GIANT public whiteboard but you've given everyone a permanent marker. If you can control the content that goes in very directly (doing some AI analysis on photos for example) then there will always be a subversive tactic like the XOR one mentioned above, etc. I suppose the real reason I comment here is that I cannot forsee anyway that these things will not happen and will not continue to happen. Like with ThePirateBay I suppose you have to go after the sites that make it convenient to find this information rather than trying to solve the problem in the blockchain itself _somehow_, which I think we can pretty much agree from a security standpoint and tech-forward approach would render the whole concept of blockchain dubious.
kbenson 8y ago
What if we took different size sliding windows, and moved them across a large dataset, and fed the resulting chunks to a pornographic image detector to look for what is likely a completely random set of data that can be re-interpreted as pornographic (or more importantly, illegal in some manner)? How much does creation matter compared to existence, compared to use? Does a formation of clouds or rocks that looks a certain way also fall under this category? With regard to illegal child pornography, I'm sure it has a lot to do with the wording of the law, but I think the intersection of how laws are defined and how they may conflict with the natural world (including randomness) is itself interesting.
mayniac 8y ago
Apologies in advance for the long-winded answer to what looks like a simple question. >Can a 16x16 image be illegal? >What about a 64x64 image? Depends on the case. If you could show the 64x64 image of child abuse to a stranger and they'd go "that's child abuse" (repeat x12 for a jury) then yes. However, there's another aspect of possession charges that says the suspect has to be aware they're in possession of an illegal image and able to access it. A 64x64 image is problematic, nobody watches anything in 64p so the only time you would see such a small image is thumbnails. If someone has an illegal image in a thumbs.db file, but they have since deleted the original full-sized image, they likely don't know a thumbnail of the image was being kept on their hard drive. And if they don't know how to extract images from the thumbs.db file they're not in possession. The interesting loophole in UK law is that you can get charged for "creating" indecent images of children. Popular belief is that it means creating new images but it more often than not refers to creating copies. In the case I mentioned, they could still get arrested for creating a 64x64 copy of the illegal image as a thumbnail. And you can usually prove that they knowingly did something that would trigger the creation of the thumbnail (downloaded the image from a dodgy P2P application 99% of the time). So to answer this: >What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image? It's complicated. Mainly because it's hard to tell who the "you" is in this situation. But assuming someone is accused of downloading both chunks of data, yes it would be illegal if the person involved knew how to XOR them to get the illegal image. The specific term in UK law is "tools or knowledge". So someone with decades of experience in anything compsci might not have to have any programs capable of XORing the two chunks together if the prosecution can prove they had the knowledge to do so using standard OS tools or write their own script/program. Really XORing is no different than encryption, you've basically just described a one-time pad. And in any cases involving encryption if you can prove that the person possessing encrypted illegal images had either decrypted them in the past, or has the capability to decrypt them (knows the password, has a keyfile, or can bruteforce) then they're legally in possession. If they had XOR'd the two chunks together already there would likely be a copy somewhere in slack space/unallocated sectors and that would be creation. In the end it would come down to a huge number of factors specific to the case.

SamReidHughes 8y ago

You can update the program to special-case those blocks, with old hash values and replacement hash values.