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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.
And anything we can do to deflate the "think of the children" hysteria will help protect our society
These children that you speak of aren't some imaginary thing you can airly dismiss. They are the hopes and dreams of the parents who raised them, the future of our society, innocent and worthy of our very best efforts to protect them. Honestly, I'd have to question the humanity of someone who is NOT outraged by any crime against a child, and least we can understand now that, that, given the active choice to let child molestors walk, that, all this other so-called liberal talk about children is a lie. They aren't interested in trying to save anyone, not the working man or the children. They are a cancer who deliberately brings countries down and ruins cultures in order to secure power for themselves. If the left can paint the current economic crisis as evidence of the failure of right wing greed, we can work our narrative too, the stabbed in the back narrative, and with ridiculous cases like this, we can and will make it stick. You just wait until Obama pardons Mumia...
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And whose to say that if a cop searches your computer for child porn, tjstork, and doesn't find any but you get charged anyway for some cracked game that you own (legally bought, still a DMCA violation!) because that evidence was collected without a warrant stating that is what they were looking for.
Then don't break the law! What is so hard about not breaking the law. What you are essentially doing is tolerating a certain amount of crime because you do not agree with the law? If the law is as important as you say it is, then should we not follow it. If you don't to pay for a game, then don't crack it! if you think games should be free, then, have copyright reform to do so. Pick one! Don't be saying that you don't have to follow laws you don't agree with and then use the 4th amendment to hide your criminal activity, otherwise, you render the law just as meaningless as the police you condemn would.
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You know, you're right. And I think *you* are a child molester. So much so that I'll report you to the police. Under the new Think of the Children Act, the police I tipped off will be at your door to kick it in, drag you out of your house, and shoot you dead at the side of the road. What, you don't like this idea? Then you support child molesters!
That's a total strawman argument. You posit that an anonymous tip to the police leading to an instant beating is the same as replacing suppression of evidence with a sanction for the "crime" of finding criminal evidence during a search. It's completely not.
You see how it works? Due process is needed for everyone, no matter how vile.
See how what works? A strawman argument followed by the lame argument that retention of so-called feature of due process that was introduced by a bunch of traitors in the 1960s is the same as an assault on the constitution itself? I think not. Let's face it, everything liberalism has done is a systematic assault on American culture at every possible turn.... and rendering Americans powerless, through disarmament and judicial indifference in the supposed name of the rights of the people, is just another line of that attack. First the judiciary, then the economy, and now the coup will be nearly complete in november... It's so obvious that left wing has never had American interests at heart at all.
my god, this country is doomed.
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Kiddy fucker.
So you are saying that requiring police to submit cause to engage in a search before performing the search was devised by a bunch of traitors in the 60's?
No, the remedy of evidence suppression was. Prior to that, they paid a fine.
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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.
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