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

But you are the rabid mob!

[tjstork]

You people cast yourself as a minority, and here I am with -17 karma on this thread... the outrage and mob is you guys, demanding that the police be hobbled at every turn, no matter how ridiculous. Your position is the popular one, and dogmatic.

I argued that letting a bad guy go because the cop screwed up is a losing proposition. You let the bad guy go and did nothing about the bad cop. What good did this decision serve, other than to let bad guys go?

The fact of the matter is that the undercurrent of this argument is in fact where you value children. Plenty of people had no problem with hacking into Sarah Palin's emails, which is a clear mob behavior - hey, she's bad, let's break into her house, which is what you people supported. But, god forbid, someone goes and finds kiddy porn on the notebook, and you want to let the guy go because your constitution has been trampled. That's just crazy talk.

If the constitution is a living document for the left wing, it is a living document for the right wing too. If you can trash the 1st amendment and the 2nd amendments, and the commerce clause, then certainly other people can trash the constitution in ways they see fit.

Ultimately, the whole point of this board is to prove that the constitution is NOT a living document. It is a treaty among the states and the people and you cannot lightly alter its terms to affect the pet causes. But, if the left wants to have the supreme court impinge upon the states in any manner of causes, grant congress the right to redistribute wealth, or any of its other causes, in the name of social justice, then I'm sorry, but we on the right are going to throw child molesters in jail, even if the cops bend the rules from time to time.