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Viewing Files on the Web Considered Possession?
Packet Pusher writes "A Georgia lawyer is taking a case to appeals court to prove that the mere act of viewing a website does not constitute possession of the materials that were automatically cached on your hard drive." While the case in question involves pornographic photos, the implications of such a declaration could reach far further.
"He said most of the pictures were viewed between midnight on Dec. 2 and 4 a.m. on Dec. 3 in 2003."
I think it's absurd that someone could face 20 hours in prison for viewing illegal pictures for 4 hours. But that's just me.
Of why -acts- should be crimes, not simply states or possession.
They're going to try the "my friend put the crack in my glove compartment" line.
This would be more like the cop finding rocks of crack stuck in the treads of your tires.
Someone could easily post an illegal picture as a 1-1 pixel image in a post on a site like this and it'd be in your cache. Are you sure you want to completely dismiss that defense?
Whether what this guy did is morally or ethically wrong is a different issue than whether what he did is illegal. If you have kiddie porn in your browser cache, do you possess it? What if someone mails you some raunchy spam and your mail client caches a copy on your disk -- do you possess it? In either case, planting evidence that could get someone serious jail time suddenly becomes trivial! I could put a link to an obscene photo on my home page and with a small amount of effort make it invisible to you but trick your browser into downloading (and possibly caching) it. Or I could wait until the Google crawler comes by, and then extort a little cash out of Google because now I can show that they possess this photo, etc. (The links don't point to my site; there's no evidence that I've ever possessed the photo.)
This is far from simple.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Generally, if something you own or that is under your control causes something that results in some form of law-breaking and/or civil problems, you are considered accountable. If your car breaks go out and you hit someone, you're almost certainly going to be considered at fault. Same thing goes for animals under your control, and any number of other examples. In general, you are expected to be knowledgeable enough to control/maintain your possessions, or hire someone who can do so for you. Why should computers be any different?
Furthermore, there's hell raised on Slashdot about how "people should have a license to use their computer" when threads about Microsoft insecurity causing worms to run rampant and cause networking problems...people often rally a call to hold anyone who cannot maintain/patch/protect their machine accountable. Then we come to a thread like this, and you see a number of posts suggesting that it's not their fault if they don't know how to do something on their computer.
Please! At least the precedence of the law is on our side for holding people accountable for their possessions.
Don't worry.
All the guys I know whose girlfriends/wives also use the computer know EXACTLY what the cache is and how to clear it.
Dude, he is getting 20 years not 20 hours! The man may be scum, but he is going to get longer for 4 hours of web browsing than most murders or actual child molesters get. He is being charged with a separate count for every image that his web browser displayed.
This is very, very dangerous. With typosquatting domains that make money of of pr0n pop ups and use endless "on exit" java script loops, anybody could wind up with illegal pr0n on their computer--and Walker County could prosecute you for each and every image as a separate count, regardless of whether you meant to download it.
This case is much, much bigger than the one person charge here. Charging people with possession for the mere act of seeing something is positively Orwellian.
Joe user goes to the newsgroups after reading about how to view naked pictures of women for free.
He has a fetish for small breasts and after searching for breasts in the newsgroup names find a category that suits him.
He then decidees to download all the jpg's from the above newsgroup along with 22 other newsgroups that sound like they might interest him.
He does this before he goes to bed and lets them download while he sleeps. He gets up in the morning and turns off this computer. Why not. He works all day. He forgets about downloading the pictures and doesn't look at them.
If some of those 10's of thousands of pictures is (even though the categories do not include young or pedophile or even teen) is he a convictable pedophile?
I would guess that if he is then EVERY user who downloads any pictures from Kazaa or any file from any newsgroup is at risk for downloading ANY supposed legal porn as the fact is that you DO NOT KNOW what is on the file you are about to open. Virus scanning doesn't help here.