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US District Court Says Calculating a Hash Value = Search

Posted by timothy on from the fair-enough dept.

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.

4 of 623 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's good to see. by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or the joys of child porn

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  2. Re:It's good to see. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Funny

    Without the requirement for search warrants (obtained from an impartial judge), the police, FBI, or other government officials/politicians can go from house-to-house-to-house taking PCs simply because they feel like it. Do YOU want to be a victim of these random, harassing, and very inconvenient confiscations. I certainly Do Not! The Constitution was written because that's precisely what was happened in the 1760 and 1770s, and the American people were stick and tired of the bullshit.

    Who cared if the Brits were confiscating PCs, with no electricity to run them anyhow?

  3. Re:It's good to see. by ymgve · · Score: 4, Funny

    Make it a TSR, and watch for all files in a directory. Sell it, profit.

    TSR? What?! Are you still using DOS as your main OS in 2008?

    Today we call stuff that run in the background while you do other stuff "Programs", "Services" or "Daemons". Get with the times, man.

  4. Re:It's good to see. by nacturation · · Score: 5, Funny

    TSR? What?! Are you still using DOS as your main OS in 2008?

    Today we call stuff that run in the background while you do other stuff "Programs", "Services" or "Daemons". Get with the times, man.

    Note the user ID of 1263. I believe you're on his lawn.

    --
    Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.