Re:Never volunteer anything to the cops (Score 1)

This is not all. The big problem here IMHO is that, as usual, the information feds use to charge the person is secret. Like the "no fly list", there is no way a person, willing to follow the rule of the law, verify if he/she is not infringing it.

For example, if they disclosed a site where one could test or verify the signatures of their files, he/she could even help the authorities by reporting a unlawful file (for the sake of exercise, assume for a second that no harm would happen to you and none of the horror stories reported would apply).

The problem is that there is no way a person can know if their homes and companies are clean from unlawful material. As we all know, not all pictures and videos come with a driver's license of the actors attached to them, and even if they did (like in some cases), they can be easliy falsified.

There is also the problem of accidentally opening an attachment, being redirected to a malicious website, getting infected with virus/trojan, and many other threats that eventually would leave your free pass to jail in your hard disk, just waiting for the knock on the door.

In conclusion, if the government goal would be REALLY fight pornography, disclose the pornographic signatures would be the right direction. (for the non-technically savvy: please note that this database are not the actual movies/pictures, but a technical term for the hash of the file, something like a fingerprint database)