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Comment by jmaygarden | Hacker News Reader

How do you avoid prosecution? Being in possession of child pornography is a crime. If you personally identified these torrents, then you are essentially confessing.

There is an interesting story in "Three Felonies a Day" where an employer discovers child pornography on an employee's computer. They contact their attorney, and the lawyer deletes the offending contact to protect the company. He then alerts authorities to the employee. The attorney is eventual prosecuted for evidence tampering. It's an absurd Catch 22.

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After re-reading: you avoid prosecution by not being a large enough offender, or by offending in a jurisdiction where law enforcement is not trained to catch you. Not all that different than avoiding prosecution as a recreational drug user when the cops are too busy going after bigger fish.

There's a lot of time and resources spent in between the time of identifying that an IP address is broadcasting CP to having all the information you need to bust down the right door and lock up the guy for a long time.

I meant how do you avoid prosecution when analyzing these images for the purpose of catching the people spreading them? There is no "fair use" for contraband. Therefore, it would be hard to build a company around technology for stopping child pornography.

Taking your example of image analysis, companies in this space will build applications that - for instance - identify which images of the 10,000 on a bandit's computer are all the same kid. The software company would use sample images of clothed kids to demonstrate how it works, then only law enforcement would input confiscated CP images to do the analysis.

Example of what private companies can do - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/facebook-photodna-m...

That doesn't sound like a Catch 22, that sounds like someone interfering with evidence. The absurd thing is if the company or lawyer would be prosecuted for not deleting the evidence. I'd hope not, cause they didn't do anything wrong if their employee did the wrong thing.

I did/do not personally identify them. I describe that law enforcement has tools to do so, but limited resources (and difficulties with ISP cooperation) to go after all of them.

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