It would be a pyrrhic victory for you even if you prove it wasn't you that was downloading it. Your name is going to be in court documents associated with prosecution over csam or other illegal materials. This information will be easily found. If you're the first case of it's kind, you will also have to deal with whatever tales the media spins about this. If you're somewhere like Florida, you might end up with your photo next to a label of 'pedophile' being plastered publicly.

A lot of people will simply see the headline, assume you're guilty and treat you as such. And a lot of people are willing to treat those they think are pedophiles very very badly (there was a case recently where a murderer serving life in jail killed his pedophile cellmate) Anyone that knows about this incident will probably never allow you to be around kids unattended, regardless of your innocence. You will be a social pariah.

Innocent until proven guilty had to be enshrined in law because most people will treat you guilty until proven innocent, and they don't have much concern about forgetting the 'proven innocent' bit.

If you want the "full experience," just set yourself up as a Tor exit node. You'll rapidly find it's impossible to use the internet from the same connection. VPN services are more and more falling into the same category. Even just "cloud provider" IP ranges are broken often enough to be noticeable - I run an Outline VPN on DigitalOcean droplets every now and then, and I've found that that's enough to get me 403'd from a lot of sites.

"Arrest first, deal with nerds protesting their innocence later" still involves getting arrested.

In a perfect world for sure, but in practice if there is any rumor that something as socially toxic as that went through your network, ultimately your reputation is ruined regardless of the legal outcome.

Would you want to turn over your computer to a forensics expert to prove your innocence?

I would hope that authorities at least would try to build an actual case against you and not just raid your home because of some fraudulent traffic from your IP. I might be too optimistic in that regard.

As long as p2p exit nodes are relatively uncommon, it will be relatively unbelievable for you to claim that "someone else" was doing the illegal things on your network.

But if p2p exit nodes were orders of magnitude more common, then the burden of proof would indisputably be the responsibility of the prosecutors, since anyone could credibly claim "someone else did it."

And that's why this trope of "but what if someone does bad stuff on your network?!" is so frustratingly self-defeating: if everyone just ignored that risk, then everyone could have a p2p exit node, and the risk would be mitigated. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma where nobody wants to be the early adopter of a system that would, on the whole, benefit all of us.

A society is difficult to surveil when everyone uses Tor as both a client and an exit node, and onion routing is the default method of exchanging packets (some might say it should have been incorporated into the original design of the internet). So it's perhaps worth noting that adversaries of society, such as the NSA or FBI, have a great incentive to perpetuate fearmongering about p2p networks and the threat of "but whatabout muh criminals on muh network!"

If you're reading this, maybe it's time to setup a Tor relay (with config flag `ExitRelay 1`).

I have no idea but maybe it would count as aiding and abetting.

thanks.

If "children" make such media themselves, is it still considered an "abuse"?