US District Court Says Calculating a Hash Value = Search

bfwebster writes "Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a great legal blog, BTW) reports on a US District Court ruling issued just last week which finds that doing hash calculations on a hard drive is a form of search and thus subject to 4th Amendment limitations. In this particular case, the US District Court suppressed evidence of child pornography on a hard drive because proper warrants were not obtained before imaging the hard drive and calculating MD5 hash values for the individual files on the drive, some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files. More details at Kerr's posting." Update: 10/28 16:23 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is a Federal District Court located in Pennsylvania, rather than a court of the Commonwealth itself.

Comments

Re:That's a terrible argument

[theaveng]

"[The government] has erected a multitude of new offices by a self-assumed power, & sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people;" - Declaration of Independence, 1776

BTW:

I have a bomb in basement. Any police force who enters my home with warrant (or probable cause) is fine with me. No objections. But if they enter without warrant, then the rules change. I'm just one person and powerless to stop them, even when they are committing an illegal unConstitutional act. However the remote-controlled bomb will take care of them quite readily. BOOM. The message will be clear to police forces everywhere - don't violate the Supreme Law of the Land.

I'm just joking of course.