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?
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_convicti...
[1] https://m.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/53y1wi/a_reddi...
"<...> 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?
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.
1. They weren't convicted of any crime.
2. The person was charged because he racially slandered someone. Not because of a thought crime.
"Oh it's not a crime to think, just to let other people know what you're thinking". Do you seriously think that makes any sense?
2. Why should this be illegal? Yes, it's offensive. But I don't think offending someone should be a crime.
Perhaps they weren't entitled to legal aid? I was under the impression that anyone charged with a criminal offence was entitled but perhaps I'm wrong.
Maybe they just wanted to get the whole thing over with quickly and not face further embarrassment? It's a good example of how these types of charges could easily be used by the authorities to intimidate people. The damage is done whether they are convicted or not.
To answer your question, it seems you can appeal regardless of how you pleaded [0]. But you have to do it within 28 days.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/appeal-against-sentence-conviction/crown-...
And that's exactly the problem: we have layer upon layer of vague and badly-written legislation, which ends up creating terrifying loopholes like the one described above.
My tinfoil hat paranoia is not quite at the level of thinking they're doing it on purpose (although I wonder sometimes).
But it's easy to see that indiscriminate surveillance combined with these vague laws create a situation where anyone could be victimised by the authorities. It's a totalitarian dictator's dream.
What kind of court routinely convicts people who didn't actually do the crime?
Possession of narcotics is a crime, isn't it?
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?
> 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.
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.
The word "routinely" might be contentious, because we have almost no numbers on it and the law has a way of making things "true" despite reality, but the kind of court you're referring to is just called a court.
You might google the Innocence Project, if you're interested in this sort of thing.
This topic always drives hyperbole here on HN and I'm not sure why. Investigators and prosecutors don't waste time trying to entrap innocent web developers. They are kept plenty busy by people who are actually making or distributing child porn. Source for that: I know someone who prosecutes child porn cases. He is kept incredibly busy with obvious scumbag criminals.
Law enforcement's ultimate goal is always to walk the chain of possession back to find the folks who are actually making the imagery--who are actually abusing kids. That is why there is strict liability for possession. It gives investigators a lever to flip distributors to help find the sources.
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.
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.
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.
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)#Un...
Not a lot, AFAICT; the main differences seem to be:
(1) "strict liability" is the term used in US (and, AFAIK, UK) law (though the latter seems to refer to a criminal offense to which strict liability applies as an "absolute offense"), both criminal and tort, and
(2) "strict liability" can be either an attribute of an offense as a whole or an attribute of an element of (the actus reus of) an offense (that is, there can be a required mens rea for some element of an offense, but if there is an element which does not require any mens rea, the element can be said to have strict liability.) From what I've seen, "absolute liability" is universally a trait of offenses-as-a-whole (though that may be because I've seen less about it, and am less familiar with the systems in which the term applies.)
Dropbox (and all other "cloud storage" providers) actively scan for CP material and will turn you in to the police automatically.
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.