Reply #20: See, here's the thing

[Occulus]

by making mere possession illegal, you open everyone up to committing a crime they didn't even know was committed.

One example that this person has posted about here before involved his friend and his friend's computer. By using just a little logic, the obvious conclusion is reached that it was an employee of the repair shop using other people's computers to satisfy his sick hunger for child porn. However, that apparently didn't occur to the police or the prosecutors.

Suppose, for another example, that you somehow obtained a virus on your PC that zombied it out to child porn sites in the wee hours of the night, without your knowledge. In that case, the images it grabs may well never be found by you. You take it to a repair shop and the nightmare starts because ZOMG THESE KIDDY PR0N IMAGES HAVE BEEN THERE FOR TWO WHOLE YEARS WTF.

And you'd be completely oblivious until you're "caught".

Yet another example: you take a picture of your kid taking a bath on one of those throwaway 35mm cameras-in-a-box. The guy developing the picture doesn't see your child, but child porn, and turns it in to the authorities. (Why aren't the businesses reporting it being charged as well?)

Things like this are why I'm not particularly willing to be known helping police gather information- I'd rather use an anon tip than actually come forward unless I absolutely had to. I've heard about people who honestly are doing the right thing "getting caught" one too many times to go out of my way to help them do their jobs.