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There are no physical objects involved here. It is entirely data. The only thing that can possibly happen is that you could gain knowledge of the data. Someone

There are no physical objects involved here. It is entirely data. The only thing that can possibly happen is that you could gain knowledge of the data. Someone could claim that there was some child porn embedded in the centre of a mountain but it would be just a claim. There would fundamentally be no way to prove that it was any particular thing unless someone admits to putting it there. The people that invented the cryptography very much intended to create this philosophical situation. We can't pretend otherwise without breaking the cryptography.

x1798DE 12y ago
That's really not the point. Whether or not you know what you are doing, you are the mechanism by which child porn is distributed. From a Bayesian perspective, you can just decide how "at fault" you are. If you're in a firing squad of 10 people and 1 guy has blanks, there's a 90% chance you're firing real bullets at the guy in front of you, even though you may have no real way of knowing whether you're actually firing blanks or bullets. Either way, there's the objective fact of what you are doing (which is independent of your knowledge of the fact) and the degree of your complicity in the action. The parent is saying that they are uncomfortable with knowing that there is an x% chance they are aiding in the distribution of child pornography. There's an argument to be made that providing infrastructure is very different from active engagement, but it's bizarre to pretend that because you can't objectively know what each packet contains that you are therefore absolved of all knowledge of the situation.