Re: Australia's New South Wales tries net-censorship

At 9:01 4/8/96, Mike Duvos wrote:

>I'd be interested to know if the courts have ever had a case in
>which a person has been declared to have been in "possession" of
>illegal material merely by virtue of its momentary presence in
>their cache, screen buffer, or usenet spool.

If you want a real world analogy, there are cases where overeager USPS
Inspectors who want to "get" someone have sent them porno as a Return
Receipt Requested Item and then raided before the person had had a chance
to open the package. That is possession under the Law.

Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 9-Apr-96 Re: Australia's New South
W.. by Robert Rosenberg@panix.c 
> If you want a real world analogy, there are cases where overeager USPS
> Inspectors who want to "get" someone have sent them porno as a Return
> Receipt Requested Item and then raided before the person had had a chance
> to open the package. That is possession under the Law.


That is also one of the times the Feds are permitted to allow child porn
out of their possession -- when they send it to someone via USPS and are
waiting to spring on the unfortunate perp as he or she is opening it.

This from conversations with former Federal prosecutors.

-Declan