While i have no intention of drawing moral equivalencies: in the US, watching child pornography videos can earn you felony jail time and permanent registration on a sex offenders list. Agree or disagree with the punishment, watching a video resulting in jail time is not without precedent, even stateside.
Aren't there employees at facebook and NSA and the like who have to spend all day looking at material that might be child pornography to verify it is indeed such? Do they have to get special clearance or something so it's guaranteed they'll never be prosecuted for it?
Come to Chile. It's stable and safe, people are warm, and nature is gorgeous. I moved here 3 years ago instead of Canada and can't be happier.
The government barely cares about any kind of surveillance and there's no cultural trait to obsessively control everything. Chile also was the first country to sign a net neutrality law.
THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE HAS ASSESSED SAN JOSE AS BEING A HIGH-THREAT LOCATION FOR CRIME DIRECTED AT OR AFFECTING OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT INTERESTS.
Above the generous threshold of about 128 bits, any given number is vanishingly unlikely to have been derived through any other process. If your 134-byte file turns out to be valid SVG for the Cartoon Network logo, then functionally speaking it is the Cartoon Network logo because it's incredibly unlikely you just pulled those particular 1072 bits out of your ass.
Similarly, if you are in possession of a 30-million digit binary number that happens to be valid h264 for an ISIS recruitment video, "oh what a stunning coincidence" isn't going to wash.
So "files are just binary numbers" doesn't get you anywhere, at all.
To be more specific, it is a number used as an argument to a function. The bit stream input into a video decoding algorithm is what makes the video. The video binary itself is mostly nonsense.
But the other way to look at is that it would be possible to have a set of data that is essentially illegal to use one function on and legal for another function to be used. Could someone unknowingly generate or acquire a set of data that is illegal to access and own? There has already been cases of terrorists hiding information within legal media.