> I'm even of the mind that mere possession of any piece of media cannot be properly regarded as criminal, precisely because it interferes with the far more important right to free speech.

While I agree in principle with the sentiment, by calling it "piece of media", you presume it to be something inert.

Stepping outside the context of obscenity for a bit, code is data and data is code. It used to be (50-100y ago) a reasonable valid argument that any media is "just words" or images, unable to hurt anyone/thing unless interpreted and acted upon by human volition. However in today's information technology-enabled society, we have automated systems and machines that will consume the data on a piece of media, and automatically perform real-world actions that have large consequences and may hurt people.

Weaponized exploit code (etc) can exist on a piece of media, and you can imagine how a rule that "mere possession of any piece of media cannot be properly regarded as criminal" can somehow always be wrangled into a loophole that abuses this rule. Information is a very weird and fluid beast, just look at the oddities around "illegal primes" or "coloured bits", to see where computational science and law collide.

I believe that our old intuitions about the fundamental nature of "information" are being challenged in a way. I don't have solutions or answers, either. I want the freedom too, but saying it's "just information" on a piece of media is a bit too quick.