How a federal spy case turned into a child pornography prosecution

While you do have a point, I don't think there is a single first-world country where it is legal. That means that everyone in power, everywhere, agrees on this at least to some degree, meaning that it probably won't change any time soon.

I feel like we're about to argue about the meaning of the word "provenance". I meant it as "where the evidence came from". You mean it as "the legal authority required to collect it". Both uses are valid, but I meant the former.

> I don't see an explicit governmental condonement of the contents of that link.

> You still haven't made a case for why possessing such information should be a bona fide crime (as opposed to being evidence of a real crime). You've merely asserted it should be illegal, with only scary innuendo to back it up.

SILEX makes it possible to enrich uranium in secret for mere millions of dollars. It was privately discovered, but the process was classified by the government. If the exact details spread, it could be a global catastrophe. I'm totally fine with this information being restricted, as the harm of censorship is outweighed by the risk of nuclear proliferation. The US government seems to agree.

> So where are these trolls now, given they can act with impunity through TOR?

They don't post links to child porn because such things aren't hosted on the open web. Right now, the worst things trolls can link to are disgusting or gory images. If the law was different, they could link to worse things.

> The problem isn't being framed, it's the ridiculousness of strict-liability non-mens-rea possession, especially of something that can be so easily obtained.

There are plenty of physical goods that meet the same criteria and are just as illegal. I think only a borderline anarchist would disagree with many of those laws. For example: Thanks to 3D printing, it is very easy to obtain a full-auto sear for an AR-15. Such a piece of metal is –by itself– completely harmless. It can't do anything dangerous unless it's installed into a compatible rifle. Yet mere possession of an unlicensed full-auto sear will get you up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

That's right: Possession of a tiny piece of metal is the difference between a completely legal existence and a decade in prison. And that has been the case in the US since 1934. When put that way, it may seem unfair. But that tiny piece of metal could easily be used to cause immense harm, and it has no other use. Just like some data.

Now, if you're willing to bite the bullet and say that possession of full-auto sears should be legal, I'm fine with that. I'll disagree, but I'll admire your consistency. On the other hand: If you don't think such devices should be legal to possess, then I think your support for possession of arbitrary digital goods is rather hypocritical.

> If the exact details spread, it could be a global catastrophe. I'm totally fine with this information being restricted

And yet such criminalization won't stop someone actually determined to use it. If your security relies on preventing the spread of readily-available information, you've already lost. Your argument only seems practical for this situation because the only entities in possession of said information are already doing the work to keep it secret.

> Right now, the worst things trolls can link to are disgusting or gory images

Or uh, illegal images they upload themselves (obfuscated enough to get around whatever secret programmatic filters the hosting sites have been forced to implement via "consent" decree), or non-linked data: urls.

> Yet mere possession of an unlicensed full-auto sear will get you up to 10 years in prison

Which obviously conflicts with the 2nd amendment, itself created with foresight of hysterical attempts to ban weapons. There's no constitutional amendment spelling out the right to own hammers, not because it isn't a natural right, but because the founders didn't envision a scenario of widespread hammer ownership being criminalized by a corrupt government (and hammers subsequently being needed to violently overthrow said government).

I'm sure you can find many similar examples of possession being criminalized - it's the dumbest, most simplistic way to go after "bad people" (base tribalism) instead of the harder route of policing and prosecuting actual bad behavior (rule of law). That its application is a foregone conclusion merely shows how totalitarian our society has become.

You can tell your browser to not download images: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/981640

This would disable all images, but that's what you want, because you can never tell if a site you're going to has been compromised and what content they're going to serve up until you've already downloaded it.

This doesn't completely solve the problem though, you'd also need to make sure you don't have Flash or Java, and disable SVG and CSS now that I think about it... plus an encoded text of an illegal image is still probably illegal, even if it's text-encoded, so, uhh... I don't know, it depends how paranoid you want to be.

If someone wanted to force you to have illegal data on your machine, there's almost certainly a way to make it happen if you're connected to the internet in any way. Hell, even gmail shows embedded images by default... and even if you didn't open the email containing the illegal content, you still have it in your inbox, so there's that...