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by _delirium 5540 days ago
It's a strict-liability offense: merely having the stuff in your hard drive cache, unlooked-at, is enough to draw a gaol sentence.

That's something that comes up periodically w.r.t. to the IWF itself. It's not an agency of the police (or part of the govt at all), so the exception to child-porn laws that permits police to view such photographs in the course of an investigation doesn't apply. Thus, if the law were to be applied as written, it should be strictly illegal for IWF employees to have accessed many of the sites on its blocklist. So either they haven't done so, and their blocklist is of questionable accuracy; or they have done so, and thereby committed a crime.

Fortunately for them, the government supports the IWF and has no interest in prosecuting them.