Possession of child porn is not a strict liability offense. You still need to have the intent to possess whatever media is at issue and you must know what the media contains.

Now, it's easy for me to believe that if you can show affirmatively that you received child porn by accident, for example through the unknown-to-you malicious actions of others, the judge might let you off, but that's not actually encoded in the law; the federal agents you mention have an accurate view of things.

If you can show affirmatively that you received child porn by accident, the judge will let you off, because there wasn't any intent to possess child porn. Moreover, the prosecution will go after the person who sent the porn to you, and will likely recommend a good civil attorney for your lawsuit against that person.

You appear to be correct. Do you know of something discussing this directly?

Sounds like you can get people easily arrested by mailing them child porn without a return address and anonymously tiping off police.

Kind of like destroying someone's reputation via sybil attacks, on an app like lulu or yelp or whatever. The NSA had slides on how fake victims could write blogs about being raped or mistreated or whatever.

Yes, that's actually happened before. It's never turned out well for the actual perpetrator.

The mail service has a remarkable ability to track mail packages, even those not sent by certified or registered mail. Additionally, police stations log all calls received--there's no such thing as an anonymous call. The use of a pay phone, prepaid cell phone, or online burner number is a huge red flag--it supports the recipient's defense that someone is attempting to ruin their reputation. Plus, almost all child pornography cases are coordinated with a special DOJ task force, due to the international scope of this offense.

Once it's been established that the recipient is being framed, the police--and the FBI--turn their attention to finding the actual perpetrator. The use of the postal service makes the frame-up a federal crime.

This is actually how the FBI actually cracked one of the more infamous child porn rings a few years ago--some idiot tried to frame his neighbor over some stupid dispute and they traced it back to him quite easily.

It's an issue, but hopefully a fairly minor one.

The classic Japanese serial novel Musashi ( http://www.amazon.com/Musashi-Epic-Novel-Samurai-Era-ebook/d... ) includes a fairly disturbing subplot about the protagonist's reputation being trashed by a little old lady of no significance who follows him around insulting him to anyone who will listen. Despite the fact that no one knows her, and many significant and influential people know (and like) him, this prevents him from landing a respectable job.

This was the case I was thinking of when I wrote that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._United_States

The wikipedia write-up suggests other grounds. From the majority opinion (via wikipedia):

> The evidence that petitioner was ready and willing to commit the offense came only after the Government had devoted 2½ years to convincing him that he had or should have the right to engage in the very behavior proscribed by law.

Jacobson was let off on grounds of entrapment; the reasoning was that the government specifically persuaded him to do what he otherwise wouldn't have done (or at least, what it could not be reasonably shown that he otherwise would have done). It's not obvious that that has much to do with whether he was or wasn't aware that child porn was illegal; the fact that the entrapment campaign included political literature protesting government intrusion tends (IMO) to suggest that he was.

Legality does get coverage as an issue, but it seems to be mostly (again, all I did was read the wiki article) as a way to show that Jacobson wasn't a suitable target for the entrapment campaign in the first place; the argument went that buying legal child porn doesn't demonstrate that he's likely to buy the same child porn after it becomes illegal.