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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.

6 of 623 comments (clear)

  1. It's good to see. by UseTheSource · · Score: 5, Informative

    The courts are finally getting up to speed on technology.

    --
    "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
    "We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
    1. Re:It's good to see. by UseTheSource · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's not that child pornographers shouldn't be prosecuted, but like it or not, they're still entitled to the same due process as normal, "non-pervert" criminals. This "it's for the children" stuff shouldn't fly when we claim to follow the rule of law.

      --
      "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
      "We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
  2. that's basically what they were doing. by yincrash · · Score: 5, Informative

    you can't generate md5s w/o actually looking at all of the data in the file.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Error made by Slashdot in headline by bfwebster · · Score: 5, Informative

    When I submitted this story, I gave it the headline "US Court:...". Someone changed that to "PA Court Says...". That's wrong. This is a ruling from a US District (Federal) court, not a Pennsylvania state court, and so carries much more weight. ..bruce..

    --
    Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
  5. Cops blow it again by russotto · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not only did they search the drive without a warrant, but they also got the defendant to confess to putting the files there by questioning him without reading his rights and telling him that he didn't need an attorney. Genius.

    Even dumber: Based on the testimony of the guy who originally found the child porn, they could have gone to a magistrate and gotten a warrant. Then there would have been no issue of a warrantless search.

    BTW, for those considering the abandoned-property angle -- the court goes into that. It wasn't a legal eviction and the defendant hadn't abandoned his stuff; he merely hadn't removed it all yet.