Legality of data "chunking" concerning child pornography

Question

Recently, I've become interested in distributed, peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing, including BitTorrent (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent) and the InterPlanetary File System (ipfs.io) (IPFS). This question specifically concerns IPFS.

IPFS is very complicated for non-technical people, so I'll try and break it down for the purpose of this discussion:

In IPFS, you can add data to the global file system, which produces a "hash" (a string uniquely identifying the data) that you can share with others. Data in IPFS is content-addressed, meaning that instead of using URLs or locations for data, it uses fingerprints of the data itself. This has several useful characteristics:

• anybody on the network with the same data can serve it to you, reducing the burden on a web server and eliminating the waste of bandwidth that is HTTP;
• data can remain available even after the original host fails, which makes archiving data much more reliable on IPFS;
• and there is no central system that can fail, like DNS resolvers, that can prevent the system from operating (aside from, of course, normal internet infrastructure).

When sharing on IPFS, you aren't actually sending whole files to peers; instead, these files are broken apart into "blocks" of data which are retrieved separately (and often from different peers altogether). These blocks are re-assembled at the end to form the complete data.

Now, suppose someone is sharing child pornography via IPFS. Under U.S. law, the mere possession of child pornography is illegal, so the sender is certainly acting illegally. The recipient of these files, after assembling the blocks to form the files, are now in possession of content that visually depicts minors engaging in sexual activity. However, would an intermediary node (hypothetically) that may have cached a block needed to form the violating data be guilty of possession? The block alone cannot represent the visual activity that constitutes illegal material, and in fact, the hash representing the block can represent any such block with the same data (since the hash identifies the data, not a location), so its entirely possible (if slightly improbable) that the same hash for a block used in child pornography could be a block used to represent part of a Disney movie. For example, these two sentences, broken down into uniquely identifiable chunks of two:

I have two cats in my house.
I |ha|ve| t|wo| c|at|s |in| m|y |ho|us|e.

and

You should burn in Hell.
Yo|u |sh|ou|ld| b|ur|n |in| H|el|l.

You'll notice that both sentences have a common chunk, "in". Under US law, would someone who possesses this block, "in", be responsible for its use in all contexts, such as in the second sentence?

Obviously, in real data these chunks are between 256 kilobytes and 2 megabytes, so the chance for collision is greatly reduced, but by design of the system, content addressing allows for the avoidance of duplicate data. My question is how that affects legal regulations concerning said data.

Answer 1

18 U.S. Code § 2252 defines a crime and punishment for knowingly transporting, or reproducing for distribution by any means, visual depictions involving the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

Here are some sample jury instructions that rephrase this and give definitions for each of these terms. Here are some others (at p. 469). This law review article discusses the knowledge requirement of this statute.

It would be an easy argument that the operators of the intermediary nodes do not have the requisite knowledge of the material flowing over their networks and computers to be implicated by section 2252, especially when they are broken down into chunks that can only be re-assembled at the destination.

United States v. Kuchinski, 469 F.3d 853 (9th Cir. 2006) is an example of a case where a defendant was found to not have the requisite knowledge of child pornography that was found in his browser's cache folders. These were complete files, no assembly required. However, the court said:

where a defendant lacks knowledge about the cache files, and concomitantly lacks access to and control over those files, it is not proper to charge him with possession and control of the child pornography images located in those files

An IPFS user has no more knowledge of the pieces being passed through their computer than this defendant did of his cache (unless of course they are the source or destination).

Answer 2

The provision of chapter 110 of title 18 (US Code) outlaw child-porn images, including computer images. The law doesn't further define what a "computer image" might be. Most likely, it would be interpreted as referring to a computer file intended to be displayable and which would display a pornographic image of a child. A corrupted porn file (which doesn't display at all) would probably be still considered to be a computer image. A file that was 75% of a pornographic image would likely also be so considered. There isn't a statutory threshold, rather this is a question of when the jury would be convinced that the file is a child porn image. If there's a 50-50 chance that the file (reconstructed, somehow) just coincidentally resembles a child porn image, that should yield an acquittal. If there's a 95% chance that the file really is a porn image, that would probably yield conviction.

Answer 3

ISP's servers can run a "hash value and photo DNA signature analysis on all of the files on their servers and any image signature that match they report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). According to the U.S. Justice Dept.(DOJ) any image including over age models that appear to be under 18 can be prosecuted, even clothed children or anything they say is CP and you can be arrested. They come around 5am screaming "child pornography, search warrant, over and over. You open the door and you are automatically pushed backward with a 9mm gun in your face followed by two four others two with long guns that look like band rifles and so do the guys holding them look like high school marching band members. Others are carrying Encase forensic units to scan your hard drive for images that match known CP hash values, including search words. Take for example you had searched, "two boy fighting" what law enforcement does is take take the words "two boys" and say it is INTENT.

CP is exempt from Freedom of Information FOIFOI reporting made that way by people in power who can only maintain their power through the conventions of secrecy; people have no idea that they are destined for judicial entrapment, extortion, exploitation, and total loss.

This lays CP investigations wide open for abuse because there is little or no DOJ oversight of the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that is funding the CP witch hunt via NCMEC and the mass media is almost completely silent in favor of giving their readers the vicarious pleasure they get from reading daily CP stories in the media and watching the arrests on TV. By creating fictitious enemies dark government agencies working in the background have increased their budget and powers 10 fold over the past two years to arrest and interrogate citizens. CP is the main card played by the enemies of privacy and freedom of speech in order to bring down websites, filter the internet, question people, implement personal restrictions on citizens and other stomping on civil liberties with total impunity. By playing the CP card it is possible to curtail all kind of freedoms without any opposition because it is about "the children" who have become law enforcement objective correlative because of the guaranteed automatic emotion it elicits. Across the nation good men and good fathers are waking up to the highly published national epidemic of pedophilia, CP, and sex trafficking involving federal and state government and the horrors of a criminal court system unwilling to look after their constitutional protections by making it almost impossible for an affirmative defense.

---

---

---

---