In the state of Pennsylvania, the crime of Possession of and Dissemination of Child Pornography is a very serious offense. Both crimes are graded as felonies of the third degree and punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine. Under the law, an accused can be charged with a separate count of child pornography for each and every picture of child pornography found on his or her computer. Child Pornography attorney Many people would be shocked to learn used computers that you may purchase from a friend or on craigslist or adult pornography that you may try to download from the internet may have child pornography on them or embedded in them.
In terms of purchasing or receiving used computers, it is very difficult to know what is on a used computer when you receive it. Child Pornography might be on your computer Even when computer cleaning programs such as CCleaner may have been run on these machines, this product (which is legal to use and has many legitimate purposes) and many other cleaning products like it, do not necessarily eradicate all artifacts of unwanted materials from hard drives. It is possible, therefore, for there to be child pornography on used computers even if they have been cleaned by software intended to destroy all files. The message is do not buy used computers!
Finally, it is also well known (such as in published studies by the Government Accounting Office dating back to 2003-4) that all P2P (peer to peer) file sharing activity carries some risk of accidentally downloading child pornography, and that this risk increases dramatically when adult pornography is being legally sought. This is partly due to the fact that child pornography is pervasive within the file sharing network, and also because keyword searches that are not indicative of child content may accidentally yield matches from child porn files. Additionally child pornography files might be benignly named, so that the contents are concealed. For these reasons, experts have opined that it is not uncommon for a regular P2P file sharing user to have unintentionally received as much as 5% to 25% child porn.
