SPF and AGC are just lucky that so far in the entire history of Section 30 of the Films Act's existence, not a single person has actually openly challenged their charging for possession of obscene materials.
Because speaking from personal experience, not only does SPF and IMDA use software to retrieve deleted images from your devices (EVERYTHING, included storage like hard drives or memory cards or USB thumbdrives, not just internal storage in your phone or computer) which already will inevitably artificially inflate the content count they claim to find, but even worse than that they don't bother to distinguish between whether or not what they retrieved is just a cached "shadow" image or video fragment of anybody showing their private parts which is the baseline for what is considered as porn or "obscene materials".
Also, they don't distinguish between what's freely available online, what's leaked/revenge porn/sniping stuff, or what's even your own personal pictures of yourself or anybody you know that is naked and has consented to you taking them. So yes you read that right:
if SPF really die die want to charge you for possession of obscene materials, even your selfie nudes or nudes of your FWB/GF/WIFE can be considered chargeable material. They can and will upgrade your possession charge if they can establish and prove that any pics/vids they find that you supposedly possess is of a leak or secret sniping to be covered under the aggravating circumstance of "revenge porn". But they won't downgrade and mitigate if it's not these kind of stuff.
The reason why this kind of pure possession charge has never been openly challenged in court before by anybody accused of them is because most of the time you only see possession of obscene materials charges being brought up in 2 kinds of scenarios:
1) The person charged is already facing charges of distribution (aka sending to anybody) of obscene materials. Which is like 99% of the cases you read about in the news that have to do with porn.
2) The person has other totally unrelated criminal charges that for whatever reason SPF and AGC decided isn't enough for whatever fine/jail time they intend to prosecute and ask the judge for. This one, see the ex-poly lecturer who got convicted for being racist in public to an interracial couple and went viral on social media for it.
The net effect is the same for both cases: possession of obscene materials is a charge that is like adding salt and pepper to make a dish more "flavoursome". Both for the prosecutors and police to push for heavier sentencing by the judge in court, and also great tabloid gossip news fodder for whatever passes as "journalists" in local mainstream media to write about as character assassination "morality slanders" on the individuals charged. There's two levels of significance to this: on one level any news about sexual deviancy or morality failures still sells in conservative-minded Singapore, and on another level public media reports of anybody being charged and convicted simply for keeping porn or sharing porn online with others is a permanent "negative PR" especially in the time and age of the Internet,
tantamount to a permanent criminal record even though if you check under the Registration of Criminals Act,
possession and distribution of obscene materials under Section 30 of the Films Act is not even a registrable crime and hence you officially have no criminal record. It only becomes registrable if you are accused and convicted of possessing/distributing voyeuristic content (aka snipes/revenge/leaked porn) for which you'd be charged under Section 377BC/D/E.
If I am not wrong about this, in the entire history of SG law since independence, only
TWO people have been charged
purely for porn possession alone without any other aggravating factors to worsen their charges beyond "they have photos/videos of naked people/sex". One was charged for possessing porn DVDs. The other was charged with obscene media found on his digital devices (smartphone and laptop). The first guy got fined something like SGD13k, the second guy got slapped with SGD42.5K which is a HUGE and unjustifiable "double jeopardy" fine because whilst he only faced charges of ONE single nature (possessing obscene material), he got fined TWICE the MAXIMUM fine of up to SGD20k PER DEVICE CHARGED (one charge for smartphone, one charge for laptop), and a "top up" fine of SGD2.5k for photos found on either one of those devices (YES, they can and will pursue photos
AND videos found on the
SAME device
SEPARATELY as if they are totally different things).
It is very easy to go on and on about just how bullshit SG's "morality laws" surrounding porn are, even more so in this day and age when you can have SG girls openly doing Onlyfans selling nudes and amateur/semi-professional porn and even get interviewed for it by media outlets such as Zula, yet you don't see any of them get singled out for prosecution under possession/distribution of obscene materials.
Ask yourselves why of anybody to be prosecuted first in SG for anything to do with Onlyfans, it had to be a guy (Titus Low) who was at the time presenting as not heterosexual?
https://sbfsg.net/showpost.php?p=22328553&postcount=130
Make of it what you will.