What to Do After Accidentally Finding Child Pornography Online

A college student was playing around with the TOR browser, while trying not to click on anything illegal, but accidentally followed an innocent-sounding link that led to a chat room that involved discussion of child pornography. An obviously illegal image was displayed in the forum. The student immediately exited the site and reported the image to the NCMEC. Is there something else that the student can or should do to protect himself?

State and federal law focus on intent to view, meaning that inadvertently coming across a single image is not something that will ordinarily result in a prosecution. Multiple images become more problematic, and it is important to delete the images rather than leaving them lingering on your hard drive, even if in a browser cache.

Here's the federal defense for accidentally coming across illegal images:

Quote:

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Quoting 18 USC Sec. 2252A(d)

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(d) Affirmative Defense. — It shall be an affirmative defense to a charge of violating subsection (a)(5) that the defendant—

(1) possessed less than three images of child pornography; and

(2) promptly and in good faith, and without retaining or allowing any person, other than a law enforcement agency, to access any image or copy thereof—

(A) took reasonable steps to destroy each such image; or

(B) reported the matter to a law enforcement agency and afforded that agency access to each such image.

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Note that the NCMEC is not a law enforcement agency. State laws vary, so it is important to check for similar statutory defenses in the laws of the state in which this occurred.

Note also that there are some sites that are traps for TOR users, and that you may have had very hard-to-detect spyware installed on your computer as a result of your TOR experiments.