Accountability with Bitcoin transactions In one of the comments to this question Highly Irregular pointed out an interesting legal issue that might arise with Bitcoin. Mainly, if some organisations use Bitcoin (say, Wikileaks) and are deemed illegal by some authority (say, the government of USA), and subsequently sending money to them could be deemed illegal, how would issues with unintentional donations be handled?

Say, someone convinces a person to send "them" Bitcoins, instead of providing them with an address of the illegal organisation. The victim performs the donation, and their support of the organisation is later revealed.

How would such a case be handled in court at the current date? Do you know of any relevant laws in say, USA, that would apply to such a situation?
I am no lawyer, but as far as I know there is no specific precedent for this, or none that I could find anyway. Due to this, if you could reasonably prove that you had no intent in supporting that illegal organisation or group I don't see a strong case for any prosecution. Obviously there is a huge amount of grey area here, so what is "reasonable" would be up to interpretation. Also each country would have its own individual laws, which makes this even harder to give a specific answer.

If you are worried, I would recommend that you do two things. 1) Cover your ass by keeping all emails or any correspondence relating to your BTC transactions in a secure place. 2) You can also use tools like PGP, Hushmail, Cryptocat, Zfone, TrueCrypt and Tor to help protect your online anonymity.