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

It's good to see.

[UseTheSource]

The courts are finally getting up to speed on technology.

Re:It's good to see.

[larry bagina]

Or the joys of child porn

Re:It's good to see.

[UseTheSource]

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.

Re:It's good to see.

[jollyreaper]

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.

And anything we can do to deflate the "think of the children" hysteria will help protect our society. It's not that protecting children is a bad thing, it's that turning people into frothing flesh-rending mobs at the drop of a hat is a bad thing. If I were a nasty sort of black-hatted individual, the quickest way I can think of for destroying an enemy would be planting kiddie porn on his computer and dropping a dime to the authorities. Kiddie porn will be the new "baggie of drugs to plant on a perp." I wouldn't be surprised to see cops dropping usb drives on accidentally shot guys. "No, don't worry, I just planted kiddie porn on the guy. Disciplinary action? We'll probably get a medal for this."

Incidentally, your tagline: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Messiah." Is that an inept slam against Obama?

Re:It's good to see.

[tjstork]

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...

Re:It's good to see.

[UseTheSource]

Kiddie porn will be the new "baggie of drugs to plant on a perp." I wouldn't be surprised to see cops dropping usb drives on accidentally shot guys. "No, don't worry, I just planted kiddie porn on the guy. Disciplinary action? We'll probably get a medal for this."

Or, a good excuse to turn a neighbor or family member in to the party. It wouldn't be hard for private citizens to plant evidence in that manner, either.

Incidentally, your tagline: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Messiah." Is that an inept slam against Obama?

Actually, given that the Nazi's brand of national socialism was ideologically very similar to Soviet Communism in many ways, I think I prefer this. ;)

Re:It's good to see.

[BLKMGK]

Speaking of frothing.... This wasn't an "active choice" to free a child molester it was a judge using common sense and realizing that this was a search without a proper warrant and throwing it out just as he would\should if an officer kicked your door down without a proper warrant.

Troll indeed!

Re:It's good to see.

[Shadow Wrought]

It is more a difference of scale. They are not happy that this guy had the search thrown out so much as the general, larger idea that the Constitutional limits of unreasonable search and seizure are being followed. The problem isn't the imaging or generation of hash values so much as it is then using those values to determine if they match any known values. Next time they'll have a warrant. And once the standard is set, the State will follow it and act accordingly.

Those who deal in child pornography and prey on children are, to my mind, some of the worst exxamples of humanity out there. I wouldn't bat an eye if they increased the prison sentences for them to life or allowed capital punishment. But it still has to remain within the bounds of our laws, the core of which is the Constitution.

Re:It's good to see.

[nahdude812]

You misunderstand the parent post. He's not saying, "it's only children, who cares," he's saying, "whether or not it's children has nothing to do with whether a suspect's constitutional rights should be violated."

The thing is that you don't have perfect knowledge of whether the suspect is a child pornographer or not. Lacking perfect knowledge, you should seek it out by following the appropriate channels.

If you are sure that someone is involved in any crime (whether or not it involves children), you should be sure enough that you can convince a judge to issue a search warrant. If you don't have enough evidence to convince a judge to set aside this person's rights, then you shouldn't just go ahead and set aside those rights even if you're really, really sure.

That's due process. That's how we protect the rights of innocent citizens from being abused by the power granted to police and other government agents. It completely doesn't matter what the nature of the crime you're investigating is. I'll say that again. It is wholly immaterial what crime you suspect someone has participated in; if you don't have enough evidence to convince a judge to issue a search warrant, you should not take the law into your own hands anyway.

The only time you might convince me otherwise is if there was an imminent threat - such as in the case of kidnappings or (since you're talking about child porn), a live feed of a child being abused, and the only as far as is necessary to secure the immediate safety of that child. This again has nothing to do with it being children though - this is just as true in my mind for securing the immediate safety of adults.

Re:It's good to see.

[jo_ham]

And nowhere in the post you quoted was the inference that you applied to it, you're one of the "frothing flesh rending mob" if you believe what you state about the post in question.

No one, not even the leftiest lefty on the left of a leftie is arguing that crimes against children are not abhorrent (maybe my grammar is though - double negatives aside).

The issue here is "do the ends justify the means?" While you may agree that anything should be permitted to catch and convict child molesters and kiddie porn collectors, you have to watch the slippery slope.

If a law enforcement agency can scan your drive and compare MD5 sums without a warrant, you have removed due process from the equation - one of the things that you are entitled to in the US justice system, regardless of your suspected crime, because like it or not, you are innocent until proven guilty.

This whole bollocks of "if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind" is bullshit. If they come to scan your drive with no proof to justify a warrant then they might as well just say that everyone's drives need to be scanned when the law asks, and if they find anything that flags you, you then have the burden of proof on yourself to assert your innocence.

It just doesn't (or shouldn't) work that way.

Do I want child molesters arrested and put away? Absolutely. Do I want them to be arrested through an illegal search of their property? Absolutely not.

It's a hot button issue, much the same as terrorism - we're in danger of severely crippling our society if we stoop to "prove you're not a terrorist/child molester/communist or we'll lock you up!"

Re:It's good to see.

[moosesocks]

If you don't agree with the parent poster, go read (or better yet, see a live performance of) "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller.

Gosh, how things have changed since the 1600s.....oh, wait.

Re:It's good to see.

[jedidiah]

These children will have to one day live with the mess that we have created for them in their name.

Re:It's good to see.

[Crudely_Indecent]

I'd like to be the first to say WTF!

The person who authorized imaging a system without a warrant needs to be prosecuted. Incompetent bastards like this are losing cases that should be easily won. Now someone who should be getting what he deserves will be set free.

4th amendment violations like this are happening more often. Why do law enforcement officials think they can make it up as they go along?

Re:It's good to see.

[elnyka]

Uhhhh, how does the 4th amendment (and the expectation of privacy) apply to something you abandon or that is no longer yours?

Re:It's good to see.

[theaveng]

>>>>>The man was clearly guilty

A lot of you are missing the point, so let me put it in bold:

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.

"[Our 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

So they setup a Supreme Law of the Land that would prevent this from ever happening again.

Re:It's good to see.

[GooberToo]

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.

Everyone agrees children need to be protected. But that's not the least bit topical given the context. Just the same, no child in inherently innocent; and that is not a sexual reference. That's a flawed Western-Christian philosophy. I've known far too many children that were far from innocent and far too many parents dismiss their actions simply because they are "innocent children." That child then grows up to be a monster of an adult.

So please stop with the "innocent child" bullshit. Ignorance is not heavenly innocence. A child is well behaved and "good", very poorly behaved and "bad", or fits somewhere in between. Many children have at least some understanding of their actions at very early ages and that doesn't suddenly change at age 18. Even if a child doesn't fully understand the ramifications of their actions (example, pull trigger = death), many do understand it is not something they should be doing - assuming the parents were doing their job in the first place.

Re:It's good to see.

[Foobar of Borg]

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

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!

You see how it works? Due process is needed for everyone, no matter how vile.

Re:It's good to see.

[LeafOnTheWind]

Actually, you are wrong about the National Socialist Worker's Party. Ideologically, the Nazis and the Communists couldn't be more divided. That's one of the reasons why Nazi Germany was considered one of the greatest threats to the Soviet Union.

You would have been correct had you said that, practically the Nazi Party and the Soviet Communist Party were very similar. This is true as both governments essentially turned into authoritarian states. Ideologically though, one is far left, one is far right.

Re:It's good to see.

[ericrost]

You just wait until Obama pardons Mumia...

Not to feed the trolls, but Mumia Abu Jamal was arrested and held under the authority of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Obama, as President of the United States, cannot pardon him for a State offense, only a federal one:

2. Federal convictions only

Under the Constitution, only federal criminal convictions, such as those obtained in the United States District Courts, may be pardoned by the President. In addition, the President's pardon power extends to convictions obtained in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and military court-martial proceedings. However, the President cannot pardon a state criminal offense. Accordingly, if you are seeking clemency for a state criminal conviction, you should not complete and submit this petition. Instead, you should contact the Governor or other appropriate authorities of the state where you reside or where the conviction occurred (such as the state board of pardons and paroles) to determine whether any relief is available to you under state law. If you have a federal conviction, information about the conviction may be obtained from the clerk of the federal court where you were convicted.

Source: http://www.usdoj.gov/pardon/pardon_instructions.htm

Re:It's good to see.

[theaveng]

>>>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.
>>>

Okay since you feel so strongly about it, when I get elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 2012, I will start a pogram.... oops I meant program to visit each-and-every house inside our lovely State and confiscate their machines. All of these PCs will be scanned for images of children, and then returned to the original owners.

I will start with your PC(s) first. You don't mind if we borrow your PCs for a month, do you?

What's that? You don't like the inconvenience?

WELL NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE YOU DURNED FOOL!

That's why we have the requirement that the government has to provide evidence FIRST, before it can be issued a search warrant. To prevent harassment of the citizens. "[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. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation..." - Constitution, 1787

Re:It's good to see.

[CecilPL]

Very succinct and to the point. I like this line a lot. My kingdom for a mod point!

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who deal in child pornography and prey on children are, to my mind, some of the worst exxamples of humanity out there. I wouldn't bat an eye if they increased the prison sentences for them to life or allowed capital punishment. But it still has to remain within the bounds of our laws, the core of which is the Constitution.

Granted. Those who take advantage of, say, 5-year-old kids should be flayed and burned where they stand.

It's the grey areas that concern me, though. The difference between a naked 17-yo and a naked 18-yo is 15 years in jail vs. perfectly legal. If you have a picture of a kid a day before his 18th birthday and a day after, what's the huge difference that makes you a heinous pervert vs. just another horney guy?

Re:It's good to see.

[Just Some Guy]

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.

I agree completely, but with the caveat that due process trumps every other concern. We can't protect children - or anyone/anything else - unless we ensure fair trials for everyone. This guy is probably a creep who should be taken out back and beat down, but we don't know that, largely because the prosecution screwed up while gathering evidence. And since tainted evidence is the same as no evidence, we can't prove that he actually did anything.

If you want to get angry, aim at the police and prosecutors who messed this up.

Re:It's good to see.

[tjstork]

The thing is that you don't have perfect knowledge of whether the suspect is a child pornographer or not. Lacking perfect knowledge, you should seek it out by following the appropriate channels.

the guy had the pictures on his computers. guilty... it's pretty cut and dry.

Re:It's good to see.

[lysergic.acid]

also, wouldn't this type of search be pretty useless for identifying kiddy porn images?

md5 hashes are useful for verifying a binary package is in fact what it is supposed to be because it's hard to create a fake or altered program that produces the same md5 hash number as the authentic copy. so it's useful for verifying a "good" file, because presumably a good file won't try to deceive you, and a bad file can't reproduce the same md5 hash.

however, with something like a digital photo, all a user has to do is make a few very minor alterations (like a small watermark) to the image and it would produce a different md5 hash--essentially exploiting the inherent design of the md5 hash algorithm--and be missed by the md5 scan. these small changes could be as simple as flipping a single bit in the file, but with a standard 24-bit RGB bitmap image, each pixel is stored as three 8 bit values representing the red, green, and blue color channels. by flipping the least significant bit in each channel, you can alter up to 1/8th (12.5%) of the file without creating any perceptible changes (to human eyes at least) to the displayed image.

another method would be to employ lossy compression schemes like JPEG image compression. convert all your images to JPEG (or if they are already JPG, just compress it again at minimal compression strength) and the MD5 hashes will be completely altered. yet another method is to resize the image by a small amount--say reduce both width and height by just 1 pixel--using bicubic interpolation to scale the image up or down would preserve the image quality while completely changing the md5 signature of the file.

all of these methods would be simple to automate and allow you to easily hide known child porn images from detection using md5 comparisons.

Re:It's good to see.

[UseTheSource]

You would have been correct had you said that, practically the Nazi Party and the Soviet Communist Party were very similar. This is true as both governments essentially turned into authoritarian states. Ideologically though, one is far left, one is far right.

That's what I meant. I think that we can agree that the effects of both regimes were basically indistinguishable. While traditionally, one would be considered far left and the other far right, when you get that far out to the fringes many of the lines get blurred.

Who was it that said, "The only difference between Communism and Fascism is that the Fascists are honest about what they're doing, and thus morally superior to Communists"?

Re:It's good to see.

[xouumalperxe]

You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".

In particular, when we get to the 17-yo case, it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age? If yes, you should be home free. We're talking reasonable doubt here. It's reasonable to think a 17-yo is 18 or 19. If it was publicized as kiddie porn in any way, I don't care if she's 15 or day shy of 18. You had the information available, you're screwed.

Re:It's good to see.

[Opportunist]

No matter how you turn it, he was prone to getting away with it. The "proof" was gotten without a warrant and without due process. No later than in revision it would have been thrown out anyway.

Oh, you mean "he was guilty anyway". Maybe. I can't tell from what I see from here. But we're stepping on a very slipery slope that way. Sure, it would be easy. It would certainly make prosecuting certain people easier who like to show the law the digital four because they know how to dance around the legal loopholes and how to turn the constitution into a shield from prosecution, who hide behind this or that amendment, knowing well that they are actually breaking the law but can still spew their filth, hate and call for crime due to the first, can't be searched even though "everyone" knows a search would show enough to put them behind bars, due to the fourth, marry and bribe whoever could testify against them, due to the fifth...

But be aware that those constitutional rights exist for a reason. Namely, the reason to protect those that are innocent but "inconvenient" to whoever is currently in power. You are, if I interpret your message right, not really a friend of the idea that Obama may seize control of the US. Still, unless something really dramatic happens 'til election day, it seems he has a good chance to be the next president. Do you want to be silenced because your opinion is no longer "convenient" and in accordance with the current ruler? Do you want sudden searches of your home for no other reason than "if you search, you will find"?

The price of freedom isn't vigilance. It is the unfortunate reality that the price of freedom is that you will have criminals that go free due to the rights that protect your freedom. Certainly, taking those rights away would give you a very handy shortcut to round up a lot more criminals than you ever could in a free country. The former soviet states were almost devoid of drugs.

But I somehow disagree with the price.

Also, be aware that laws are subject to changes. What is legal today needn't be legal tomorrow. No government on this planet enjoys the idea of firearms in private hands. Governments usually want the power monopoly in the country they control. Your second amendment, which is almost unique on this planet, takes this power monopoly away from your government. The price is, of course, that criminals will have guns, too. That criminals are able to resist arrests far more successfully than they could if gun possession was illegal, if for no other reason than them having less training than law enforcement due to a lack of chances to practice, not to mention that having a gun alone would already be grounds for an arrest. It would certainly make it heaps easier to arrest, or at least search, someone who might have done something wrong. Or is just "inconvenient".

Should we make guns illegal due to it?

The constitutional rights limit the power of the country and give you freedom. Some will use this freedom. Some will abuse it. That's the price of being free. If you have no rights, of course you cannot abuse them. But, seriously, do you want that?

Re:It's good to see.

[pclminion]

You see how it works? Due process is needed for everyone, no matter how vile.

Due process isn't meant to protect the guilty, who, after all, will be incarcerated for their crimes. The guilty are protected only by the edict against cruel and unusual punishment. Due process is meant to protect the INNOCENT. Criminals are only granted "due process" because due process is the only legitimate way to determine IF they are guilty.

Re:It's good to see.

[Alpha830RulZ]

Actually, it looks like a pretty good search technique. It's fast, easy to automate, probably a low percentage of false positives, and can be used to link perps together through shared files. As you note, it would be easy for the pervs to block, by dropping a few bits, but I suspect it would be effective for a while.

It's still a search, with all that goes along with that. But it's probably better than having Officer O'Reilly deciding that your picture of your daughter playing at the beach sans diaper is porn.

Re:It's good to see.

[theaveng]

>>>Ideologically though, one is far left, one is far right.

Perhaps the reason they were *practically* identical to one another, is because if you move far enough to the left, and far enough to the right, you will eventually meet yourself. (The universe is spherical.) So there's no real difference between National Socialists or Communists - they are both just authoritarian control freaks.

I recommend you go a wee bit "north", and take a look at the ideas of the libertarians or the anarchists. "We would have no government at all, if it were possible. It is only to preserve our rights that we resort to government at all." - Thomas Jefferson

World's Smallest Quiz - http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp

Re:It's good to see.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Those who deal in child pornography and prey on children are, to my mind, some of the worst exxamples of humanity out there.

Well, to my mind, they are still fellow human beings and fellow citizens who deserve every moral and legal right as to the rest of us.

I wouldn't bat an eye if they increased the prison sentences for them to life or allowed capital punishment.

I would shed a tear for each such measure as yet another branch was torn from the tree of liberty. I would mourn the needless waste of human life.

But it still has to remain within the bounds of our laws, the core of which is the Constitution.

The law, and even constitutions, are ultimately subject to the will of the people. People like you and others in this thread who would rather join a rabid mob than go against one and stand up for what is right. If you're too afraid of unpopularity, or condemnation, or guilt by association, to defend the rights of others, then you don't deserve a single one of those right yourself.

You, and every poster in this thread panders to hysteria by sycophantically declaring your own inflated revulsion at these crimes. Every time you do so, you further strengthen the forces that are eating away at the foundations of law and freedom in the western world. No reasonable person need declare their revulsion for these crimes. Yet everyone insists on doing so, loudly and explicitly at the earliest opportunity.

Because they are afraid.

"Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them" - Frederick Douglass. The west has submitted to the howls, intimidation and demagoguery of the Outrage Brigade. We will suffer whatever injustice or wrong they now choose to impose upon us, and it seems, will do so indefinitely. Please read the rest of the Douglass quote, and think next time before you obediently proclaim your moral standing.

Re:It's good to see.

[operagost]

But that's not the least bit topical given the context. Just the same, no child in inherently innocent; and that is not a sexual reference. That's a flawed Western-Christian philosophy.

Actually, the bible says that all have sinned and fall short of God, without excluding children. Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount that those like children will inherit the kingdom of God; but that is just a hypothetical example like his parables, as even children aren't perfect in this flawed world.

Re:It's good to see.

[Free the Cowards]

Your attitude scares me. Nobody should be flayed and burned at all, much less where they stand.

Everybody deserves a trial. And everybody who is found guilty at a trial deserves punishment which is not cruel or unusual.

At the risk of Godwinning the thread, they didn't flay or burn the top Nazi leadership. They gave them trials, then hanged or imprisoned them. These people were responsible for far worse crimes than "taking advantage" of a single five-year-old child, but we didn't think that their punishment should exceed the law.

Re:It's good to see.

[arth1]

This guy is probably a creep who should be taken out back and beat down, but we don't know that, largely because the prosecution screwed up while gathering evidence. And since tainted evidence is the same as no evidence, we can't prove that he actually did anything.

Indeed. There can be people with child porn on their machines who are totally innocent.
I can envision at least a dozen scenarios, including (but not limited to):
- Irate ex-wife planting the stuff.
- Refurbished drive which had only been deleted, not reformatted. Old stuff still (invisibly) in the \RECYCLER directory.
- Someone running a transparent proxy for their open wi-fi, to increase speeds and minimize the impact of sharing.
- Browser cache, where a remote site has put child porn in a sprite sheet or similar used to display ads. The user has never seen it, and thus not deleted it either.
- The user might be the rightful owner of the material, which is illegal only in other people's possession. A father having a picture of his own children, nude, will usually not be child porn. If someone copies the images and uploads them somewhere, they become child porn. But the original images aren't. ... and a myriad of other possibilities.

But that, or whether the guy is guilty or not is all besides the point, which is that without a warrant based on reasonable suspicion, no-one should have a right to inspect anything. The heinousness of the crime must never be allowed as an excuse to bend rules, or innocents will suffer.

Re:It's good to see.

[andy.ruddock]

also, wouldn't this type of search be pretty useless for identifying kiddy porn images?

It's obviously good enough in some cases - like this one, as 5 videos containing child pornography were, in fact, discovered.
This has been discussed a few times recently on \.

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

Hey: amazingly enough, there aren't actually a bunch of democrats screaming for "Up with pedophiles, down with children!"

There are a lot of us trying to increase funding for schools, see that our kids learn science in science class instead of religion, and do other things to concretely benefit everyone's children.

The above poster's point, and it is a good one, is that demonizing any class of criminals is actually not very helpful to actually CATCHING and STOPPING them. Pedophiles are people too... people doing horrible things, who we need to catch as soon as possible. Hysteria about it doesn't help. Look up the "Satanic Panic" sometime, for an example of the dangers that completely innocent people can suffer from societal panic.

Also, it's just making you look stupid to take a single person's statement and try and spread it into a "THIS IS PROOF ABOUT LIBERAL EVIL." A person who, by the way, may not actually even hold 'liberal' beliefs, given that his question on Obama doesn't actually show whether he's pro or anti, just that he thinks a Hitler allegory is inept.

Re:It's good to see.

[nahdude812]

They didn't know that when they violated his constitutional rights. I'm not talking about whether or not he was guilty... I'm talking about whether or not they had a right to look at all - and without a warrant, they didn't.

The 4th amendment doesn't get suspended just because you incant the word, "children."

Re:It's good to see.

[DavidTC]

I don't know if fascists being honest is actually a plus.

Communists have to pay lip service to ideas of equality and justice and stuff, and, more to the point, it actually happened to some extent at a lower level. Piss off the people high enough in the government, sure, you were toast, but piss off some lower-down people and if they came after you it was possible that they'd be the ones in trouble. Granted, it would be because someone else was worried about them, but there was, at the lowest level, a form of very corrupt and venal justice.

Whereas with fascists, a doctrine of raw power doesn't have to pay lip service to wish-washy ideas of justice and freedom and equality. Communism had show trials, fascism had no trials.

Also, in a more practical sense, fascism needs enemies to operate, and communism doesn't, at least not to same extent. Because communism is, in fact, pretending to be what is best for the people, whereas fascism is not. Fascism requires an 'other' to rail against, communism does not. It comes 'pre-railed', if you will, against 'the rich', and it can keep railing against them even when they are gone.

Hence fascism is a good deal more dangerous to subgroups that live within it, and neighboring countries. Fascism is a much more dangerous form of totalitarianism and authoritarianism to be near.

OTOH, under fascism, at least the economy tends to work.

Re:It's good to see.

[theaveng]

>>>the guy had the pictures on his computers. guilty... it's pretty cut and dry.

I agree. In fact I think the police should continue their search for child porn, and start searching all 110 million homes in America, confiscating PCs without search warrant, and comparing hash values on the drives.

We'll start with your house first.

What's that? You don't want the inconvenience of warrantless searches and losing your PC for a month while its scanned? WELL NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE YOU DURNED FOOL! That's why the requirement for a judge-issued warrant exists; to stop the government from going house-to-house-to-house harassing citizens!

DUH.

The government is the People's Servant, not the other way round.

Re:It's good to see.

[tjstork]

The 4th amendment doesn't get suspended just because you incant the word, "children."

Where's the constitution for the victims of crime, rather than the perps. I guess that balancing act doesn't matter at all you now, does it. So pretty much, what you are really saying is, that the perp, who -had the pictures-, deserves more constitutional protections than the victims, who got, nothing, when you let this freak walk. Yep, that's a good system right there.

Re:It's good to see.

[alta]

Yes, easy, but many of the porn collectors aren't going to be bothered with actually doing the edit...

So, go out and make a program that will automatically change a few bits in each file in a directory. Make it a TSR, and watch for all files in a directory. Sell it, profit.

Then the fbi will be after your list of customers (child porn collectors) because it's more complete than theirs.

Shit, the FBI should write this program and sell it from a fake company.

Re:It's good to see.

[Free the Cowards]

I could hack into your computer and plant pictures. Then you would have the pictures on your computer. Are you then guilty? Is that situation cut and dry?

It seems to me that most people, on this site and elsewhere, don't really believe in evidence, due process, or innocent until proven guilty. They think that suspects are guilty, period. The rest of the stuff is just a formality meant to please the judges. According to this attitude, if the crime is heinous enough and the publicly-available evidence damning enough, the trial becomes redundant and pointless.

This attitude, quite frankly, scares the everliving shit out of me. Everyone deserves a fair trial, and that means properly obtained evidence. You can't simply throw this out because you think a particular crime is really extra special bad.

Re:It's good to see.

[pipatron]

Those who deal in child pornography and prey on children are, to my mind, some of the worst exxamples of humanity out there.

Worse than murderers? Worse than someone who was driving drunk and ran over a child?

Re:It's good to see.

[Arthur B.]

You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it.

Begging the question.

Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".

Many legal rules are not clear cut, that's why judges are not computers.

First of all, penal law is immoral, only the victims should have a claim against their aggressor. The victim should present the damage in front of a judge, establish the lack of consent, and the verdict set accordingly.

Child molesters cause terrible harm, and should be punished accordingly. It is however less obvious that the average pedophile pervert who consumes the product of these crimes commits a real crime himself. While they deserve contempt it is unclear if they deserve jail.

Re:It's good to see.

[DrLang21]

And how was it discovered that he had these pictures? Was a search warrant for his files issued? If not, then the point of this stands. Find sufficient evidence to get a search warrant, THEN nail him.

Re:It's good to see.

[jeffb (2.718)]

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?

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

And the hell of it is, the 22 year old that accidentally slept with a 17 year old; well, he's still going to be forbidden to see his 12 year old sister until she grows up. He's still going to have to find some place to live that's not within ten miles of schools.

These sorts of liminal states are just going to come up more and more, and to be bigger and bigger problems, partly due to the utterly awful sexualization of girls' clothing. At this point, the difference between a 15 year old's clothing and an 18 year old's is likely that the 15 year old's clothing is skimpier and sluttier.

We need to do two things; we need to make some judgments that are currently just binary, i.e. either you're sex offender registry or you're not, into more gradated judgments. And we need to work to reverse the societal trends that are driving people to consider banging people at the edge of consent (and beyond) optimal.

Re:It's good to see.

[mister boo]

Yes, Someone put the pictures on the computer, but since it went through 3 other peoples' hands with at least one of them having a grudge against the defendant, it cannot be proven that he is the guilty party. The landlord could have planted the files to get the guy that cheated him out of rent money "Really Good". Chain of evidence should have had this case tossed already. And before you start on another rant, I do have children, but I reserve the right to go vigilante on anyone who harms them for myself, not a lynch mob of morons looking for a cause to make their penis feel larger!

Re:It's good to see.

[Jason Levine]

But how do you know the guy had pictures on his hard drive? How did they get there? (Some else mentioned that planting Child Porn on someone's computer would be a great way to ruin their life.) Can the photos be admissible as evidence in a court of law?

Plus, there's the risk to the person's reputation if you are mistaken. Suppose the police didn't need a warrant to seize and search personal belongings. A police officer might arrest me and seize my belongings based on some flimsy connection (say, one of my co-workers who I often talked to had some child porn on his computer). My name might get plastered across the media as a sex offender (accused, not that it would matter in the public's eye). I could be fired from my job, lose my kids, basically have my entire life ruined. When the police eventually got around to searching my hard drive and found no child porn, they might be honest and clear my record, but I'd still be guilty in the eyes of the public. I still might have to fight to get my kids back. My marriage might be ruined thanks to the strain. I might find it tough to get work.

Trust me, as the parent of two young children, I want to protect them from the grossly perverted segments of society. But I also don't want to unravel our country's civil rights in a misguided attempt to protect them. I'd rather make sure everything was done properly so that, when we seize someone's belongings, we have real evidence that they are involved in a criminal activity. Giving the police unchecked powers is dangerous which is why the Founding Fathers built our government with a series of checks and balances.

Re:It's good to see.

[gstoddart]

The 4th amendment doesn't get suspended just because you incant the word, "children."

No, just terrorism and border security.

Cheers

Re:It's good to see.

[tjstork]

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.

Re:It's good to see.

[nahdude812]

You're speaking in the past-perfect tense. You're speaking only with perfect knowledge of what transpired.

The problem is that is not how decisions are made. Decisions are made with imperfect future knowledge. When they decided to search this guy's computer, the did not know if they would find evidence of child pornography. Whether or not they found anything, once again, is completely irrelevant to whether they should have looked at all, because you cannot know before hand if you will find anything; you can only suspect you will.

I agree, there is a balancing act, and we should balance the rights of victims with the rights of criminals, but also with the rights of non-criminals. Fortunately exactly how we balance that is very clearly defined for us by the legal system. When you suspect someone has committed a crime, and you need to violate their 4th amendment rights to prove it, we have this excellent system already set up to facilitate it. It's called the warrant system, and its whole purpose is to balance the rights of victims with the rights of citizens which we do not yet know to be a criminal or not.

You're completely ignoring an entire class of citizen. There's victims, criminals, but most significantly there are people who are neither. THAT is the purpose of the 4th amendment.

I'm not saying, "4th amendment, therefore you can never search," I'm saying, "4th amendment, therefore you need to follow the procedures we have in place which provide checks and balances to protect innocent citizens from abuse by people in authority."

If this guy wasn't a criminal, he still would have had people searching his stuff. Or maybe you don't believe in privacy for innocent citizens at all. If that's the case, then you and the 4th amendment are incompatible, and you should return to Tudor England and stop taking advantage of the freedoms the blood of patriots have purchased for you.

Re:It's good to see.

[ymgve]

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.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

"children... are the hopes and dreams of the parents who raise them..."

I find it interesting that the first (and presumably most important) value of children you've chosen to provide is to fulfill the desires of their parents.

This is exactly the kind of parental attitude that leads to psychological problems that many will carry well into adulthood.

It is profoundly unfortunate that noone is thinking of the children who are abused in this way.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolute bollocks. I don't care if a crime is against a child or an adult; a man or a woman; a local or a foreigner. It's the crime that counts not some sentimental shit from trolls like you.

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

I hate, hate, hate replying to a sig, but whose daddy's job is stealing from the neighbors?

I think the metaphor is a little mixed here, all I'm sayin'

Re:It's good to see.

[gnick]

First of all, penal law is immoral, only the victims should have a claim against their aggressor. The victim should present the damage in front of a judge, establish the lack of consent, and the verdict set accordingly.

Be careful with absolutes like that. You just legalized murder, beating somebody to the point of brain damage, racketeering where victims are too afraid for their own safety or that of their loved ones to take people to court, etc.

Perhaps you were only referring to the kiddie porn issue and suggesting that 5 year olds should file charges against their exploiters (often their parents), but even then it's a stance that's kind of hard to understand.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH, under fascism, at least the economy tends to work.

I guess you haven't been paying attention to the US economy under supreme leader W.

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

Preferring one inept slam based on a false image of Obama's political stance over another is just as well, I guess.

Also, I find it funny that you CHOOSE to Godwin yourself every time you post by default, with a sig that could be easily mistaken for a declaration of white supremacy.

Your non-Obama point stands and is fine, of course.

Re:It's good to see.

[unlametheweak]

Those who deal in child pornography and prey on children are, to my mind, some of the worst examples of humanity out there. I wouldn't bat an eye if they increased the prison sentences for them to life or allowed capital punishment.

I usually see a lot of hypocrisy in people however. People will demonize sex which is healthy, but they will in turn let children be subjected to religious perversions.

I personally am against the death penalty, especially for "sex crimes". I will give people who pervert the minds of children with religion little sympathy however. I wish there were vigilantes who protect children from religious fanatics because that is where the real danger lies. Unfortunately the people who prey on children the most are the religious, and there's not much we can do about it except for vigilantism.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Perhaps your home ransacked, and computer seized to protect the children. And please go ahead try and use your second amendment right to bear arms to defend your home from a government search while your at it.

Re:It's good to see.

[nacturation]

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.

Re:It's good to see.

[MaskedSlacker]

Back then we called them Programs, Services, and Daemons too.

Re:It's good to see.

[davidwr]

Re:It's good to see. ... the joys of child porn

Please tell me you don't mean that.

Re:It's good to see.

[Snaller]

Yes that is surprisingly insightful.

Re:It's good to see.

[rgviza]

If I were a nasty sort of black-hatted individual, the quickest way I can think of for destroying an enemy would be planting kiddie porn on his computer and dropping a dime to the authorities.

You could _destroy_ someone this way. All you'd need to do is break their wireless router, change the mac address on your wireless card, connect, then download a bunch of kiddie porn using their connection, burn it to CD, slide it under the door, hang out til they get home, and you see them pick it up (putting their finger prints all over it), call police.

There would be evidence at the ISP showing it was downloaded via their connection, and possession is 9/10ths of the law. They'd be screwed. The police wouldn't bother checking their PC for a lack of evidence which would indicate that someone else did this to them because they'd have enough to convict them.

This would be WAY too easy to do to someone and even easier than planting it on their PC.

-Viz

Re:It's good to see.

[MaskedSlacker]

Why is what the drunk driver hit (or didn't hit) relevant to the moral repugnancy of the crime? A moral violation can only be made by a choice. A person chooses to drive drunk. They do not choose who they happen to run into (or not as the case may be). Therefore, drunk driving must be equally morally repugnant in all cases regardless of whether the driver hits a child, a child rapist, or no one at all. The only exception to this I can think of is in a case where the drunk driver takes someone with him inside his car. And of course, we can argue diminished capacity all damn day as well.

Re:It's good to see.

[computational super]

Methinks he doth protest too much, actually... although the topic of child neglect or physical abuse (i.e. "beating") children doesn't come up too terribly often on Slashdot, whenever and wherever it does, I typically see attitudes of pity and sadness for the victim, rather than the righteous "torches and pitchforks" anger that comes up in these (to my mind) less severe cases. Perhaps somebody's wrestling with his own inner demons?

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'm outraged every time rights - rights self-evident - are denied to ANY member of this society in the name of 'the children'.

Maybe it's because I've just finished watching John Adams, but I can't help but think that these lunatics who desire to trample liberty in the name of 'the children' aren't the next tyranny that needs to be dealt with.

Due process, especially, must NEVER be sacrificed upon any altar, no matter how 'good' a cause the proponents of evil make it sound. Yes, evil - any attempt to abridge our rights for any poster cause, is the work of evil incarnate. More evil than child molesters. More evil than mass murderers. More evil than terrorists.

Since this is Slashdot, more evil than Microsoft.

Re:It's good to see.

[MaskedSlacker]

I commend you for the intellectual faculty to dissect the man's thoughts at a neuro-linguistic level.

I am saddened to inform you though, that he has never heard of either past-perfect or future imperfect. Its well beyond his intellect.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that a strawman argument? This guy's computer was searched without a warrant, only a "suspicion". This is very exactly comparable to getting an anonymous tip and then going into someone's house.

Maybe not as far as shooting that person, but they did go in and violate this guy's rights without probably cause. If today they can search your home and person without any cause, what tomorrow? We already have a problem with people "resisting arrest" whenever police are mad at them - ie: getting beaten just for being a suspect.

By the way, are you really as insane as your last paragraph indicates? Do you have no clue whatsoever about the basic principles this country was founded upon? Things like "the brits can't randomly search our homes" and "the brits can't torture us just because we torched their tea boats" and "the brits can't break into our homes, plant evidence, and then use that planted evidence to convinct us of crimes"?

Re:It's good to see.

[FireStormZ]

The only difference in the Fascist realize that in large numbers man needs government and the Communist believe in a utopia without government but they needed to kill restrain and eliminate 'enemies of the state' to get to this fairy tale land..

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 internets for using the phrase "begging the question" correctly.

Re:It's good to see.

[MaskedSlacker]

What the fuck are you smoking? Share some of that shit.

Re:It's good to see.

[lilomar]

Or, just replace "victim" with "victim or legal representative of victim".

I don't think his point was that the victim needed to necessarily be present, just that the consequences should be compensatory, not punitive.

(Note: I am not endorsing his point of view, just trying to clarify his position.)

Re:It's good to see.

[MaskedSlacker]

I think they were two separate statement's about the nature of government. Not a single joint one.

Re:It's good to see.

[hmar]

Agreed, but the point is that there is a legal, and an illegal way of ascertaining that he did, in fact, have those pictures. Our legal system has always ignored evidence that was not legally obtained. The second crime here is by the police that allowed that evidence to be wasted by not following proper channels, thus damaging their ability to bring a child pornographer to justice. Think of the precedent set had this been allowed, and tell me, when your computer is being searched with no warrant, along with your car/ home / self, that you have no problem with the illegal search, because sometimes they catch a criminal that way.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct. No matter how bad it is we must follow the law.

Re:It's good to see.

[MaskedSlacker]

I have to point out that your statement that criminals are able to resist arrest much more successfully due to the legality of guns is absurd.

Why do I say this?

Because the VAST majority of all firearms used in the commission of crimes are already illegally obtained. Making them more illegal isn't going to change anything.

Re:It's good to see.

[lilomar]

May the Maths Be with you!

May the Logics Be with you.

You, and every poster in this thread panders to hysteria by sycophantically declaring your own inflated revulsion at these crimes.

By your own statement:
1: Every poster in this thread panders to hysteria by sycophantically declaring their own inflated revulsion at these crimes.
2: You are a poster in this thread.
Therefore: You pander to hysteria by sycophantically declaring your own inflated revulsion at these crimes.

Try not to paint everyone with the same brush, mm'kay?

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

And everyone is INNOCENT untill proven guilty, including an alledged child molester / kiddy porn junky. So since they scanned his drive in order to find out whenever there is a case against him, he was INNOCENT, in which case the law of due process applies.

Re:It's good to see.

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, you are wrong about the National Socialist Worker's Party. Ideologically, the Nazis and the Communists couldn't be more divided. That's one of the reasons why Nazi Germany was considered one of the greatest threats to the Soviet Union.

Who considered Nazi Germany "one of the greatest threats to the Soviet Union"?
Stalin considered Hitler to be only world leader he could trust (of course he proved to be wrong). That was why Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in early WWII. The difference between the Nazis and the Soviets were that the Nazis were German Nationalists, the Soviets considered themselves Internationalists.

Re:It's good to see.

[Wescotte]

Not to support child molesters but they were children once too.. They are still people and have rights. Once you dismiss their rights there is nothing to stop anyone else from taking yours away on the basis of something as idiotic as "think of the children"

Re:It's good to see.

[lilomar]

Could you send me the contents of your hard drive please? You should have no problem with that by your logic, after all, it might stop someone from looking at kiddy porn.

Re:It's good to see.

[hmar]

Due process can only work if it protects EVERYONE! It must be applied before guilt or innocence is established, and must therefore be universal, or it falls flat and useless.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who deal in child pornography and prey on children are, to my mind, some of the worst exxamples of humanity out there.

I agree on the second point, but not the first. What does it matter what some lonely pervert whacks off to? It's the creation of child pornography that we need to stop, since it involves abuse of actual children.

Re:It's good to see.

[MightyYar]

The same 22 year old could legally travel to some countries in Europe and have sex with that same 17 year old. And yet, we consider Europe to be quite civilized.

I completely agree that the law should be fuzzy on this issue. It should nab people like teachers preying on students, but should not penalize clueless bar-goers who inadvertently take a 17-year old with fake ID home. The couple down in Florida who took pictures of themselves while underage is really, really tragic.

Re:It's good to see.

[The Spoonman]

These children that you speak of aren't some imaginary thing you can airly dismiss.

As a parent, I disagree. What's in the best interest of my daughter is growing up in a society that is free from the type of madness and baseless hysteria that forms the remainder of your post.

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.

Absolutely, and that includes remaining a society and not a festering mob. It includes not throwing out civil liberties and due process of law just to punish people we don't like. I don't like presidents that spy on Americans, and feel that it's in my best interest that Bush be brought to trial, but I don't see any slavering "conservative" mobs backing me up. It's much more likely that she'll live in a police state than she'll be molested by a stranger.

Honestly, I'd have to question the humanity of someone who is NOT outraged by any crime against a child

Who isn't outraged by this crime? But, that doesn't mean I can't be outraged if the perp's civil rights were violated, especially in this case. There are other shades than just black and white. How often have we read stories of people who went through "the system" for child porn that they could provide reasonable explanations for being there, such as malware? The law's priority IS to ensure the innocent aren't harmed...even if they've been falsely accused of having child porn.

That being said, pedophilia is a mental disorder that needs to be treated, not punished. I question the humanity of any person that can't see that some things can't just be wished, or locked, away and forgotten about.

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.

Actually, it's the conservative churchies who are more likely to scream "think about the children" than the liberals. Despite what the Ministry of Truth (Fox News) tells you, "liberal" is not a dirty word. Liberals gave women and blacks equal rights. Liberals ensure that you, as a citizen, get a fair day in court. If, however, you're stinking rich, the 'pubs will be happy to bail you out...even if you ARE a child molester as lot of them have been found to be of late.

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.

I thought you were talking about liberals here? This description matches the actions of the "conservative" party over the last decade and a half.

You just wait until Obama pardons Mumia

Having grown up in Philadelphia and having a fair number of relatives who serve on the Philadelphia police force, and the police forces of neighboring areas of New Jersey...well, I'm not going to defend Mumia...but I can tell you first hand that brutal racism is rampant in the people who are sworn to serve and protect in that area. My own family members and their friends on the force are sufficient proof to me. I know we like to live in a fantasyland where that's not true, but until you see it firsthand, you have no idea what you're talking about. But, given your other statements, that's not a hard argument to make.

Re:It's good to see.

[jafiwam]

You don't even have to hack.

Just a few malicious ad networks or compromised servers and the 1x1 in HTML yet full blown CP image will automagically appear in the temp cache of the browser.

We all know virus spreading ad networks don't exist (NOT), of COURSE nobody could spread child porn that way either.

Re:It's good to see.

[networkBoy]

In addition is should be noted that almost by definition, the smart ones aren't caught. Thus making the assumption that most criminals are !smart, it would follow that they do not alter the exif field to create false MD5 sigs.

On a flip side, would it be possible to get the known "bad" MD5's then using a rainbow table, create innocuous files that equate to the "bad" hash, similar to the self recursive web page that pretends to host madonna.mp3 to trap RIAA spiders?
-nB

Re:It's good to see.

[huckamania]

The French and others have an entirely different concept of justice that doesn't give a rats ass about individual rights but instead seeks to arrive at the truth. I'm not advocating the French justice system, I'm just pointing out that there are others and that the societies that use them haven't crashed and burned.

The US justice system is a mess and has only been getting worse. DAs act like Monty Hall. Punishment doesn't even come close to fitting the crime. Aggravated assault is more harshly punished then murder, so if you attack someone with a weapon, make sure you kill them. Sentences are too long and jails are too soft. We don't even pretend to rehabilitate, which is why sentences were increased and while in jail, criminals just become better at not getting caught. Borrow a page from the Japanese and have them pound rocks while subsisting on fish heads and rice.

Re:It's good to see.

[unlametheweak]

Methinks he doth protest too much, actually

I agree, and so my usual comparison of sex and religion (and there are many ironies juxtaposing the two). It is always the most religious who are most indignatious and guilty. Religion is indeed scarier than sex; whether the religion is a more secular "save-the-children" belief or something more superstitious. It is the fanaticism of Faith that scares me the most, and the irrationality of crowds (congregations).

I've heard Fundamentalist Muslim men say they couldn't control themselves if woman were allowed to show any skin (including the face). I see the same type of attitude in the West with the views the Religious Right has towards children. The people who want to control people the most (through laws or violence) are the people whom we should be afraid of.

Best regards,

UTW

Re:It's good to see.

[maztuhblastah]

Actually, it looks like a pretty good search technique.

No, it's a pretty shitty one. Here's why:

1. It's easy to fool. Change one bit of your files, and they've got a totally different hash. More practically, anyone who recompresses a known image will end up with one that the hash scanners don't find.
2. It's not accurate. The article says they used MD5. MD5 is ridiculously vulnerable to collisions. It's trivial to make a second, unrelated file that has the same hash as another, provided you can add arbitrary data to the end of it. And guess what sort of files tend to be well-suited to that sort of padding? Yup. Image files.
3. It depends on the algorithm (a corollary to the above). So you know MD5 sucks, and pick another algorithm, let's say RIPEMD-160. Great. Works fine, and now you've got a foolproof method for finding child porn, right? For now, you might. But what happens in 10 years when a couple of Chinese researchers release a paper showing how you can construct collisions for RIPEMD-160? Do you go back and re-try all the cases based upon the findings of the hash search? Or (as I suspect will happen), do you simply let them rot in prison because they already "struck out" according to your hash search?

Re:It's good to see.

[sumdumass]

I guess ma question I have might be, is there any other files that could have hashes that match child porn files?

I think this goes a little deeper then if a pervert has some files on their computer. It is more or less addressing the idea that having a file with a has value similar or that matched something they think is illegal would become a legit ground for a search. so if creating the hashes aren't covered by the same protections as the constitution provides, then the fourth amendment wold never be enforceable because a cop can look for something suspicious and always get the warrant.

An analogy that might fit here would be where a cop see you carrying something that looks like a picture, then uses the size of the picture to make the claim that you might have child porn so he can get a warrant to search your house. This isn't one of those "if you have nothing to hide" scenarios.

Re:It's good to see.

[Sancho]

When you suspect someone has committed a crime, and you need to violate their 4th amendment rights to prove it, we have this excellent system already set up to facilitate it.

Just a quick, but important nitpick.

It is never acceptable to violate a person's 4th amendment rights. The word "unreasonable" in the 4th amendment indicates that there can be reasonable searches, too. A reasonable search does not violate the 4th amendment rights of the individual, because the 4th amendment does not protect against reasonable searches. A search conducted with a warrant is reasonable, as are a few other types of searches.

Re:It's good to see.

[Sancho]

It seems to me that most people, on this site and elsewhere, don't really believe in evidence, due process, or innocent until proven guilty. They think that suspects are guilty, period.

Unless it's a high school kid implicated in hacking, in which case he was just learning, and that's what schools are for, and it's the fault of the administrators for not securing the computer network.

Re:It's good to see.

[SCHecklerX]

the courts already accept what a hash is for forensic investigation. In fact, if you *don't* hash your original (actually, twice with different algorithms is standard practice) and your working copy, it's likely any evidence from the investigation will be thrown out.

The kiddie porn known hashes are a quick way to do the search. There is a list of known hashes, not only for CP, but all kinds of other nefarious stuff, or even for things specific to the investigation. Forensic tools allow you to use these lists of hashes to speed your investigation.

That said, while talking to some people in the industry, I was told that CP is the #1 thing that these investigations are for.

Re:It's good to see.

[Schadrach]

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? Or is it that police should be able to search anything, anytime, anyways, due cause or not, and if they happen to find something then it sticks and they just say that they are sorry for violating the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure?

Re:It's good to see.

[WTF Chuck]

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.

While I agree that going into someones home or business and seizing/searching/imaging their hard drives is a clear 4th amendment violation, I find it surprising that it was applied here. The computer was not seized, it was voluntarily given to law enforcement.

The computer's owner had been evicted from his residence and left the machine behind. The person who got the machine, as a result of the eviction, then handed the machine over to law enforcement as possible evidence. The owner should have known that upon eviction, his stuff would be removed from the property and anything that was there would have the possibility of being made available to anybody. He was just too stupid to take the machine, or pull the hard drives.

The government clearly screwed the pooch by not making a more convincing argument that the machine should not have been subjected to 4th amendment procedures.

If I were to find a large quantity of drugs on the streets and turn it in to the police, would they need a warrant to look for fingerprints or other evidence of who owned the drugs. If I found documents indicating criminal activity, would the police need a warrant to look at the documents after I turned them in. The answer should be no, the they are being voluntarily handed to law enforcement for investigation. The drugs/documents/whatever could then be used to obtain warrants related to the crime.

All this ruling will end up doing is making warrants easier to obtain for law enforcement. Your honor, we need these warrants, because case such and such threw out evidence of child porn for lacking a warrant to search evidence voluntarily handed to law enforcement. Throw whatever extra "protect the children" spin required on to that, and some judges will become rubber stamps for issuing warrants.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to learn a lot more. You'll find babies are a common representation of cherubs. Furthermore, you'll find plenty which is contradictory in the bible, let alone what is in the bible and what is taught in church and society in general. In short, both the church and western society (heavily influenced by the Christian church) teach babies and children are innocent and should be elevated above other men. Such lore is even ripe super natural story lines, etc.

The bible doesn't teach politics, but that doesn't stop it from happening in church. And when was the last time you smashed someone's testicles for adultery? How about stoned your wife for being disrespectful? Unless it was yesterday, you're very likely a hypocrite citing bible passages.

Re:It's good to see.

[DavidTC]

I can still buy toilet paper, so we're doing better than the Soviets. :)

Anyway, the fact that Bush can screw up fascism is not that amazing. The man can't even eat pretzels.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kiddy fucker.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Benjamin Franklin used a kite to get electricity from a lightening storm in the 1752, now hand over your geek card and follow the white rabbit until you reach alberqueqe.

Re:It's good to see.

[tjstork]

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.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most image files have fields for placing text comments that would not require loss of quality to the image. There are several metadata streams that may be added to a movie file to accomplish the same thing. Luckily, most people are lazy and will not do this. It is fairly easy to create an encrypted folder, too. If all the files were in that none of the hashes would have matched.

Re:It's good to see.

[nahdude812]

Thank you, that is an excellent point.

Re:It's good to see.

[Jawn98685]

You mistake is considering sexual predators to be some form of "human life". OK, yes they are are human and are deserving of certain rights, but liberty is not necessarily one of them. This group has an extraordinarily high rate of recidivism, approaching 100% depending on how one measures. It is fair to say that, in general, they don't "get better" following incarceration, treatment, rehabilitation, etc. They will, almost always, remain a danger to the object of their twisted desire. So please spare us the "they deserve the same rights as everyone..." rant. Maybe they do, but they are trumped by the rights of their potential victims. And yes, I am fully aware that this is a slippery slope - but this is an extraordinary case where "innocent until proven guilty" is folly when applied to those who have demonstrated that they are "dangerous until proven otherwise".

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

" 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."

Wow... Do you mean that the wait for Duke Nuke Them Forever is nearing its 250st anniversary?

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

The same 22 year old could legally travel to some countries in Europe and have sex with that same 17 year old. And yet, we consider Europe to be quite civilized.

The age of consent varies in the US, too. In my state it is perfectly legal for me, a 37-year-old, to have sex with a consenting 16-year-old. But woe unto me should I dare to photograph that same 16-year-old naked.

Re:It's good to see.

[zoips]

I would expect 3 to be a nonissue. The purpose of the hash search is to identify possible matches. Possible matches are then verified according to whatever stupid rubric is used to identify child porn. Therefore, a collision attack would create many false positives which would lower the usefulness of the search method but would not change the actual identification of child porn.

It's preposterous to assume that any lawyer defending a client accused of possessing child porn would throw up his hands in the face of the authorities only identification being based on a hash. Any non-retarded person would ask the next logical question: did you actually look at the image/video and verify?

This method is a convenience search. The authorities still have to go through all the other steps to identify and verify child porn. If anything this search method is more likely to make authorities lax and catch less people with child porn.

Re:It's good to see.

[Opr33Opr33]

Parent had a great point about the labeling of child porn. When I lived in NC, a local prosecutor was caught in a federal child porn sting. The feds sent him an advertisement(snail mail) offering child porn videos. They made it clear that the videos were of minors. He bought himself a conviction when he signed a personal check and mailed in an order.

In case you are wondering - said individual is now a defense lawyer.

Re:It's good to see.

[Rastl]

If I were a nasty sort of black-hatted individual, the quickest way I can think of for destroying an enemy would be planting kiddie porn on his computer and dropping a dime to the authorities. Kiddie porn will be the new "baggie of drugs to plant on a perp."

We had to change the e-mail address of one poor soul where I worked due to a very nasty divorce in progress. His wife used his work e-mail address to sign him up to a variety of very unsavory e-mail lists and sites. You can guess why she did it.

Many, many cases are 'tossed out' due to lack of proper warrants. This just clarifies that a search on a computer is considered the same as a search of a home and requires the same authorization. Substitute 'terrorist materials' for 'child pornography' and you'll have the same conclusion from the ruling, except that the government could then have invoked the Patriot Act and done all kinds of mischief without telling anyone about it.

Re:It's good to see.

[fugue]

It's not that protecting children is a bad thing

I wonder. It is obvious that completely protecting children from everything makes them grow up into weak morons who rely constantly on being protected from themselves (in some countries these people are referred to as Americans). Children need to be hurt, a little bit, frequently, in order to learn. I suspect that most of the hurt should be self-inflicted ("You probably won't hold a cup of scalding coffee in your lap while driving anymore, will you?") but knowing that the world will sometimes hurt you and that you have to juggle benefits vs. risks is a fundamental--and oft-neglected--part of growing up.

Can anyone point me to research on how much and what kinds of hurt tend to lead to good education? That would be a very hard study, since "good education" is so hard to measure, but surely someone has made at least an initial stab at it?

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Garrison Sr.: Would you have sex with your son to save his life? [the others ponder the question]
Patron 2: ...Oh, this is one of them Scruples questions, ain't it?
Patron 1: Nono, I got a better one: Would you have sex with your mother... to save your father's life?
Patrons: [wondering] Wooo, yeah.
Patron 2: Oh, like if someone had a gun to your father's head and said, "Have sex with your mother or else I'll shoot him"?
Patron 1: Yeah.
Patron 2: Oh, that's a tough one.
Patron 3: Hmmm.
Mr. Garrison Sr.: No no wait, uh, you don't understand.
Blond: How about if someone made you have sex with your mother and father to save your own life?
Patrons: No, no, no way. No.
Patron 6: But if it was to save my mother's life, uh-I think I would have to have sex with my father.
Patron 7: Yeup.
Patron 8: Me, too.
Patron 9: Well, I think that goes without saying.
Mr. Garrison Sr.: Well actually, I'm just... talking about a... son.
Patron 8: Well, pesonally, I would have sex with my son to save to save my mother's life. It depends, uh- how big a gun are we talkin' here?
Mr. Garrison Sr.: Uh, he doesn't have a gun.
Blond: The father doesn't have a gun?
Mr. Garrison Sr.: No! Nobody's got a gun!
Patron 3: I think if someone said, "Have sex with your mother or else I'm gonna kill your son," but he didn't have a gun, I wouldn't do it
Patron 2: He could have a knife, though.
Patron 1: Yeah.
Patron 3: Sure.
Patron 1: Yeah, a knife.
Bartender: If a killer put a knife to my throat, and said, "Have sex with your father or else I'm gonna kill your mother while having sex with you," ...I would have sex with myself.

Re:It's good to see.

[manekineko2]

You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".

In particular, when we get to the 17-yo case, it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age? If yes, you should be home free. We're talking reasonable doubt here. It's reasonable to think a 17-yo is 18 or 19. If it was publicized as kiddie porn in any way, I don't care if she's 15 or day shy of 18. You had the information available, you're screwed.

First off, the fact that the bar must be set somewhere is not a total defense of the law. At least two issues jump out at me.

First, the question that should be asked is the bar in the right place? On its face, 18 appears to be a rather irrational cutoff. 17 year olds are well into the realm of sexuality in terms of their own desires, and only a liar or a gay man would claim that there are no 17 year olds he is sexually attracted to.

Second, there is a long-standing understanding of rules versus standards in law, with rules used in some places and standards used in others. Rules are bright line, and easy to follow. Standards are sensible, but more administratively burdensome and less consistent. An example of a standard in law is the civil claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress (i.e. you can sue someone for being a real asshole, but they better be a real asshole). It is not obvious on the face of the issue to me that the rules approach we have been using in the case of the 18 rule is better than a standards approach (for example, maybe setting the cutoff at onset of puberty).

With regards to your second point, are you suggesting that is the approach we should take, or that is the approach that is taken? Since I'm not sure that a subjective belief can get you off of a charge of possession of kiddie porn, though I haven't researched this and am no expert on the subject.

Lastly, with your approach, assuming that it is a statement of how you believe things should be, what if someone has pictures of naked 18 year olds, but was duped into thinking they were of 16 year olds and hence kiddie porn. If we're going to only look at the mental state of the perpetrator, should we send him to jail on a totally victimless crime?

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mistake is considering sexual predators to be some form of "human life". OK, yes they are are human and are deserving of certain rights, but liberty is not necessarily one of them. This group has an extraordinarily high rate of recidivism, approaching 100% depending on how one measures.

This is a widely held fallacy. The rate of recidivism for sexual abuse is actually lower than for many other offenses. Look up DOJ statistics if you'd like. It's been covered many times before on /. It's also interesting how you paint with such a broad brush; do you consider people who are attracted to post-pubescent teenagers to have "twisted desires"?

Re:It's good to see.

[bluie-]

Just call suspected child pornographers "suspected terrorists" and then it becomes "for the state" and we won't have to worry about the clearly BS "it's for the children" line ;)

Re:It's good to see.

[manekineko2]

Actually, that issue has been taken care of to a certain extent. Under the Protect Act, that same 22 year old could face up to 30 years in prison if he paid for the sex, for engaging in consensual (legal in Europe) sex with that 17 year old when he returns to the US. If she was less than 16, then he would face prison even if it wasn't paid.

Reference

Re:It's good to see.

[VolciMaster]

Incidentally, your tagline: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Messiah." Is that an inept slam against Obama?

Why would that have to be a slam (inept or brilliant) against Obama?

Re:It's good to see.

[DrLang21]

It is you who do not believe in protecting the innocent. Until these images were found, the man was by all standards of the law, innocent. Taking and searching his hard drive without a warrant is therefore theft of an innocent man's property. The same would apply for you or anyone else.

Re:It's good to see.

[mvdwege]

Who considered Nazi Germany "one of the greatest threats to the Soviet Union"?

How about the Nazis themselves? Their writings are available from libraries with a decent history section. Go educate yourself, and shut the fuck up until you do.

Mart

Re:It's good to see.

[MightyYar]

That sort of underscores my point. :)

I wasn't saying, "Look here's a loophole!"

I was saying, "Western Europe is not a backwards place, and yet what he would not be a criminal there."

Re:It's good to see.

[Shadow Wrought]

Well, to my mind, they are still fellow human beings and fellow citizens who deserve every moral and legal right as to the rest of us

Yep. That's why I said that in my post. "And once the standard is set, the State will follow it and act accordingly." and "But it still has to remain within the bounds of our laws, the core of which is the Constitution."

I would shed a tear for each such measure as yet another branch was torn from the tree of liberty. I would mourn the needless waste of human life.

Molesting children and then distributing pictures of the same is not something which I would list under "Liberty." I guess I see their decision to act that way as using their life to harm others instead of help others. I guess I'm missing how you find such behavior to be a valuable contribution to society.

People like you and others in this thread who would rather join a rabid mob than go against one and stand up for what is right.

I consider Justice against those who prey on children to be the right thing to do. I'm not sure what exactly it is you have against that. Are you saying that child pornography should be legal? Is that what you are trying to imply? If so than I would vigorously disagree.

You, and every poster in this thread panders to hysteria by sycophantically declaring your own inflated revulsion at these crimes. Every time you do so, you further strengthen the forces that are eating away at the foundations of law and freedom in the western world. No reasonable person need declare their revulsion for these crimes. Yet everyone insists on doing so, loudly and explicitly at the earliest opportunity.

So by stating that the laws need to be followed in prosecuting these crimes I'm weakening them? And to whom am I a sycophant? The "Mob?" Maybe its not that we're a mob, maybe its that we as a sociaety recognize teh crime for what it is and the impact that it has on the victims. Are you saying that reasonable people don't need to say they are revulsed because everyone already feels it, or that a "reasonable" person wouldn't be revulsed?

The west has submitted to the howls, intimidation and demagoguery of the Outrage Brigade. We will suffer whatever injustice or wrong they now choose to impose upon us, and it seems, will do so indefinitely. Please read the rest of the Douglass quote, and think next time before you obediently proclaim your moral standing.

Prosecuting people, in accordance with the laws, even when the crime is particularly heinous to us, demonstrates our strength as a society. Regardless of my revulsion of the crime, the defendant does have their rights and they need to be respected- as I said previously. I think the punishment for crimes against children, the emotional scars of which they will likely carry for a lifetime, should be graver. That doesn't equate to lessening constitutional protections or making an exception. It means that we are more aware of the affects on the victim of the act and are modifying the punishment accordingly.

Frankly, it sounds like you are doing exactly what you think everyone else is, and raging against a perceived threat which frankly, I'm against and clearly stated a such; but which you are tirading against with an over-the-top response.

Re:It's good to see.

[Opportunist]

There is one important difference.

With illegal guns, you can "accidently" or "randomly" watch a person and should you discover one, he's already due for illegal possession. Legal guns mean that he COULD technically have the gun legally, you'd have to check and, as law enforcement, you might not be allowed to do so when you just "happen" to see him having one.

Still, any law won't influence whether he has the gun or not. Whether something is illegal or not, someone who intends to commit a more serious crime than just having something illegally won't care about the legality of possession.

Re:It's good to see.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

You seem to forget ... this is slashdot. People here actually defend Obama's "let's kill abortion survivor babies" vote. That children are human beings with their own rights (meaning that parents can't just have any right to their children, and since they're not children ... this "reduces their freedom")

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAUSAian, but assuming you mean improperly acquired evidence being forbidden from being used as proof, then that's a bloody good idea.
See, when you know the police didn't follow rules when obtaining that "evidence", you can't know for certain how badly they broke the rules. So the only safe assumption, considering that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing, is to assume the "evidence" has no relation to you.

Allowing the police to abuse their power is a far greater problem than not getting some guilty people convicted of their crimes.

Re:It's good to see.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

On a flip side, would it be possible to get the known "bad" MD5's then using a rainbow table, create innocuous files that equate to the "bad" hash, similar to the self recursive web page that pretends to host madonna.mp3 to trap RIAA spiders?

You might want to read up on that collisions paper. The technique is not quite ready to use rainbow table to create random colissions ...

Re:It's good to see.

[Psmylie]

The 4th amendment doesn't get suspended just because you incant the word, "children."

Where's the constitution for the victims of crime, rather than the perps. I guess that balancing act doesn't matter at all you now, does it. So pretty much, what you are really saying is, that the perp, who -had the pictures-, deserves more constitutional protections than the victims, who got, nothing, when you let this freak walk. Yep, that's a good system right there.

What are you talking about? The children in those pictures/videos have the same exact Constitutional rights as the accused.

You're mixing up a criminal harming someone with our government ignoring someone's rights. Police can't search your property without due cause or a warrant, but that doesn't stop a criminal from breaking in, because criminals are criminals, meaning someone who breaks the law.

It's a completely separate issue. Get it?

And yes, sometimes that means that a bad guy goes free. But I'd rather have that risk, than to have a government that ignores people's rights. We'd have to have another revolution, in that case, which would be a much bloodier prospect today than it was a couple hundred years ago.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

also, wouldn't this type of search be pretty useless for identifying kiddy porn images?

There is a project called hashkeeper which keeps a hash of "bad" images. This probably works pretty well in practice because it is unlikely that anyone is going to take the time to color-correct, crop, fold, spindle or otherwise mutilate every single file in their (legit or otherwise) porn collection. (Or if they did, and still got caught, those mods would be added to this database)

The big problem with this database is that one has to be a member of a law enforcement agency to gain access to it, so there is no way of knowing what else is being classified as "bad", nor is there anyway that a reputable provider can create an application that can protect the user from accidentally downloading something illegal (to protect against something like the recent FBI child porn sting.)

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wanted to point out that if the man were a "child pornographer" then his files would be original and wouldn't match known hash values. Since they DID match known values, then all he's guilty of is downloading something or even nothing more than clicking a link to a web page.

Re:It's good to see.

[unlametheweak]

...should be flayed and burned where they stand.

Interesting and disappointing how such Flamebait can be modded up so much and so quickly. It's scary that there are so many dangerous and immoral people in the world.

Re:It's good to see.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Trivial for the feds to do the following :
-> read in image file
-> resize to standard 40x40 resolution, to 16bit color (defeating most "noise adding" attempts)
-> run contour detection filter (defeating just about anything I can immediately think of)
-> create md5 of the result

Which would already be non-trivial to defeat. You'd have to do translation (more than a few pixels too) to defeat this, or rotation. This would probably be described in the paper as "md5 checksums" or even just "checksumming".

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nude children in innocent poses is not child porn (www.purenudism.com).

Re:It's good to see.

[Nethead]

Hey alta! Don't send those damn kids over here!

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that issue has been taken care of to a certain extent. Under the Protect Act, that same 22 year old could face up to 30 years in prison if he paid for the sex, for engaging in consensual (legal in Europe) sex with that 17 year old when he returns to the US.

Oddly there are states in the US where 17 is legal. So he could go to prison for breaking a law that isn't even a federal law? I bet you have the age wrong on your example, but the principle is still bad. Our government shouldn't be trying to enforce its laws in other countries, even only on its own citizens.

Re:It's good to see.

[digitalsolo]

You make a valid point, with the way the GP phrased his statement.

That said, victim does not have to mean the specific person that the crime was perpetrated against. If my wife was murdered, she was the victim of the murder, but myself (and all parties which care/have an interest in her) are also victims of the crime by association, and can bring the case forward in her stead. Civil cases about crimes are handles this way, wrongful death suits for example.

That does still leave those that have no one who cares to represent them without any reparations though. i.e. homeless man without family.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy probably downloaded some pictures, that doesn't make him a "predator". Jesus!

Re:It's good to see.

[UseTheSource]

Also, I find it funny that you CHOOSE to Godwin yourself every time you post by default, with a sig that could be easily mistaken for a declaration of white supremacy.

It's not reductio ad Hitlerum, if there is a valid comparison to be made. ;)

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work in an australian court. And I remember a judge in tears throwing out a paedophile case where the guy was *clearly* guilty as hell, but the prosecution had bungled it so badly it couldn't' possibly be presented to the jury in that state. Afterwards she practically broke glass screaming at the prosecutor.

Afterwards I asked her about the case and she told me that although she was bitter , even the worst of scumbags deserve a fair trial, and that fair trial wasnt it.

Later that year they retried the case properly and the guy got 20 years.

Re:It's good to see.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I consider Justice against those who prey on children to be the right thing to do. I'm not sure what exactly it is you have against that. Are you saying that child pornography should be legal? Is that what you are trying to imply? If so than I would vigorously disagree.

And now we see exactly what your protestations of outrage are really all about. You would force the rest of us to stand to attention behind you or risk having the vilest of accusations thrown directly against us. You are a pitbull of social reactionaries who will use any weapon, no matter how odious, to chip away at the foundations of our free society and who will without conscience pass within a hair's breath of libel so as to cut most deeply without risk to yourself.

You, and people like you, are destroying the western world, one pointing finger at a time.

Re:It's good to see.

[MemoryAid]

There's a good rebuttal to the admonition "think of the children!" Can we boil it down to a soundbite?

...maybe something along the lines of "the children wouldn't want this," but it still needs more bite.

Re:It's good to see.

[Dog-Cow]

Do you really think the hashes themselves are submitted as evidence? I would think that the hashes are only used to get a warrent for actually looking at the files with matching hashes. The problem in this case appears to be that there was no warrent to do the initial search, thus invalidating any further evidence-gathering based on the hashes.

But I didn't RTFM, so what do I know.

Re:It's good to see.

[Arthur B.]

Thanks, that's exactly it. Some people may be the victim's natural recipient of his claim against the aggressor. I was making a digression on penal law anyway, it's not fundamental to the point.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the scumbag with the kiddie porn on his hard drive should "disappear" while being "transported" to his "residence"

Re:It's good to see.

[Dog-Cow]

What is the point of a punishment that is not cruel?

Really, the common attitude here regarding the Criminal Justice system is just plain bizarre.

Re:It's good to see.

[Arthur B.]

racketeering where victims are too afraid for their own safety or that of their loved ones to take people to court, etc.

You can be threatened to testify that you were not a victim. It's a big problem but not exactly specific to the case where victim bring their agressors to trial.

Re:It's good to see.

[alta]

I'm posting this as text at 300baud. TSR takes 10 seconds less time to tx than "programs", "services" or "Daemons" ;)

Beside, you knew what I was talking about, and so did eveyone else here worth a damn ;)

Re:It's good to see.

[Dog-Cow]

It wasn't all that many years ago, in the grand scheme of things, that the 15 year old would have been married, possibly with a child or with one on the way.

The entire 18 year old cut-off date is so stupidly arbitrary it's boggles the mind that the Law can be taken at all seriously. Males and females mature sexually at 13 and 12, respectively, but are forbidden* to act on it for 5 or 6 years. And we wonder why teenagers are so f*ing messed up?

* I know consensual sex is allowed between minors, but even there, crossing the boundry can ruin your life, which is ridiculous and utterly ignores NORMAL human behavior and evolution.

Re:It's good to see.

[cmburns69]

Given all the revulsion that is always expressed towards those accused of such crimes, I can understand why everyone is afraid to be associated with anything other than revulsion towards the crimes.

Under the current hysteria, one can be condemned by the population for mere allegations-- and even though they can be cleared by the courts, their name will forever be associated with the rumors.

People need to take a step back, and realize that perfect justice cannot be enforced by people or courts in our world, because each person's perception of justice is different from others. People often rely on the ancient maxim "an eye for an eye" in determining justice. In game theory (which attempts to model human interaction), this form of justice is called tit for tat. This means that if somebody wrongs you, then can exact equal justice from them either directly, or through the courts. This sounds good, but in reality is far from perfect:

[An]...error in either player's interpretation of events can lead to an unending "death spiral". In this symmetric situation, each side perceives itself as preferring to cooperate, if only the other side would. But each is forced ... into repeatedly punishing an opponent who continues to attack despite being punished ... . Both sides come to think of themselves as innocent and acting in self-defense, and their opponent as either evil or too stupid to learn to cooperate.

A more optimal strategy for dealing with injustice is "tit for tat with forgiveness". This is generally like the tit for tat strategy, except that sometimes, instead of extracting revenge, you forgive the opponent and behave as if they had not wronged you. This allows for recovery from getting trapped in a the aforementioned "death spiral".

People who are marked as sex offenders are marked forever. They will always be on the fringe of society, never able to rise, and the odds are that they will spiral towards other habits that bad for society. We, as a society, need to understand that the hysteria around these crimes does more harm than good.

Re:It's good to see.

[Dhalka226]

As far as I can tell with the information we have, you're absolutely correct. It should be exactly that easy to circumvent.

But your question as to whether or not it is useless is, I think, already answered with a pretty resounding "no" by the fact that you're asking it in this story. Whatever they're doing, it caught somebody. Maybe this method only catches stupid people. If you buy into the "go after the demand" theory in why possession of child pornography is illegal in the first place, that's perfectly acceptable. And from a more generalized standpoint, most criminals are likely to be fairly stupid anyway. If you don't believe in that theory, then the entire expedition is useless from the get-go because you'd be going after the creators, meaning you wouldn't have an md5 of their creations on hand to verify against anyway.

Re:It's good to see.

[svank]

You see how it works? Due process is needed for everyone, no matter how vile.

Due process isn't meant to protect the guilty, who, after all, will be incarcerated for their crimes. The guilty are protected only by the edict against cruel and unusual punishment. Due process is meant to protect the INNOCENT. Criminals are only granted "due process" because due process is the only legitimate way to determine IF they are guilty.

Yes, due process protects the innocent. And under US law, everyone is (or perhaps "should be" is more accurate nowadays) innocent until a judge decides they have been proven guilty. It doesn't matter how sure the cops are that you're guilty; there must be due process until the end of the trial.

Re:It's good to see.

[Free the Cowards]

Well I don't know, why is this prohibition in the constitution?

Generally it's considered that "cruel punishment" is a subset from just plain old "punishment", where the punishment is particularly designed to create suffering rather than to simply right wrongs or restrict the criminal. Therefore prison by itself is not considered cruel, but burning alive is.

Re:It's good to see.

[jonaskoelker]

Point 1: absolutely true.

Caveat: how long does it take for the child porn consumers to put new practices into use?

Point 2: use a hash that doesn't suck. md5 was a dead horse ages ago. It's been turned to soil, and the plants that grew out of it have all died too. Use a newer hash.

Point 3: in fact, don't use a newer hash. Use several. When one gets broken, you still have the other five to rely on, so your findings are likely to be true; also, start using a new one to compensate for the death of the old one.

This scheme can work, just not for what it's used for, coming back to point 1.

Re:It's good to see.

[madigan82]

Those who deal in child pornography and prey on children are, to my mind, some of the worst exxamples of humanity out there. I wouldn't bat an eye if they increased the prison sentences for them to life or allowed capital punishment. But it still has to remain within the bounds of our laws, the core of which is the Constitution.

Granted. Those who take advantage of, say, 5-year-old kids should be flayed and burned where they stand.

It's the grey areas that concern me, though. The difference between a naked 17-yo and a naked 18-yo is 15 years in jail vs. perfectly legal. If you have a picture of a kid a day before his 18th birthday and a day after, what's the huge difference that makes you a heinous pervert vs. just another horney guy?

"Well it's more for the 12 year olds than the 17 year olds". I agree. Grey area. Same logic in arguing why somebody who is a day shy of 20 can't drink or a day shy of 18 can't smoke. Few hundred years ago, women were having kids at 14 and younger but now that's bad.

Re:It's good to see.

[Dog-Cow]

The bible never mentions any of those punishments for those acts. You may or may not be a hypocrite, but you are certainly an ignorant idiot.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

The courts are finally getting up to speed on technology.

Seems that *one* court got up to speed on one issue. Are you really sure you want to infer a trend from a single anecdote?

Re:It's good to see.

[Dog-Cow]

Umm, you make absolutely NO sense, what-so-ever.

The innocent don't need due process to protect them. They are innocent, after all.

Due process is to stop harrasment, and that's all.

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

Males and females hit PUBERTY at that age. They are by no means sexually mature; they're not even finished growing their secondary characteristics. Up until about 17 - 18, they have an INSANE level of danger from pregnancy, they fail to recover from it well (almost certain anemia, for example), and frankly, they're really not mentally or emotionally competant to deal with the realities of sex.

Re:It's good to see.

[sjames]

In particular, when we get to the 17-yo case, it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age? If yes, you should be home free. We're talking reasonable doubt here. It's reasonable to think a 17-yo is 18 or 19. If it was publicized as kiddie porn in any way, I don't care if she's 15 or day shy of 18. You had the information available, you're screwed.

We're living in a world where a daycare center was razed to the ground and then the ground was dug up to a depth of several feet looking for 'tunnels' where satanic abuse was supposed to have happened (in addition to many other plainly fanciful events). Also, one where a minor girl was tried fro child pornography because she was found in possession of a nude picture of (drum roll please) HERSELF!

It's all too necessary to replace a smudgy grey line with finer gradations to prevent some of the crazier 'for the children' police and court actions.

Re:It's good to see.

[jonaskoelker]

If it was publicized as kiddie porn in any way, I don't care if she's 15 or a day shy of 18.

In my eyes (I'm 25 fwiw), most persons of age 15 are not---sexually speaking---children. Young is sexy for a good reason: youth correlates well with fertility.

That said, I wouldn't go out hitting on 15-year-olds due to the large age difference; for one because of the frowns and odd stares I'd attract, for two because I think I could have a meaningful relationship with very few of them.

Let's look at it this way: most 15-year-olds wanna fuck. Most of those do. I take that to mean it's natural for them to do it. They may be naive and less-than-careful in their choice of partners and practices, but they fuck. They're ready.

Lower the bar to titless girls and falsetto boys, and I'm we might start talking.

it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age?

I'd think it's a good place to ask, as an addition, what a reasonable person would think and do. (ianal, tinla).

--Jonas K

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

It's not obvious that it's about Obama, was part of my statement. It just looks like the kind of crap skinheads spout.

Also, that if is ridiculously false, and makes you look at minimum crazy and hyperbolic, at maximum like a stupid racist.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you go back and re-try all the cases based upon the findings of the hash search? Or (as I suspect will happen), do you simply let them rot in prison because they already "struck out" according to your hash search?

You know, maybe it's just me, but don't you think that when the hash values of a file on a suspect's computer and a known child porn file match, they're gonna check the actual to make sure it really is child porn?

Hashing suffers from many flaws, but this isn't one of it, unless you believe people are going to be convicted based on hash value matches without the actual images or videos being looked at AT ALL.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who became sexually active at the age of 10 (with another similarly-aged individual; might have been 11 at the time, I don't remember what time of year it was we started), I'm going to call bullshit on your "not mentally or emotionally competent" assertion.

This is, of course, assuming that (once it becomes an issue) you use contraception; I imagine there are people a decade or three older not mentally or emotionally competent to deal with the realities of child-rearing, but sex just isn't that troublesome otherwise.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not funny it's asinine!

Re:It's good to see.

[Mr2001]

You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".

No, you don't have to "set the bar somewhere". Age limits are never necessary, because age is an arbitrary measurement with only a vague correlation to the qualities that actually matter in terms of protecting people's rights. In every single case where age limits are currently used, we'd be better off replacing them with something more sensible (or in some cases, eliminating them -- the age limits on driving and running for office, for example).

And of course, moving away from age limits doesn't mean moving over to "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow". On this News For Nerds site, we might like to think that you can't be sure of anything unless a number is attached, but that's not really true. Look at all the other laws, the ones that don't involve age: are they fuzzy and impossible to enforce? Mostly, no. For example, the difference between voyeurism and consensual porn is pretty clear even when age isn't a factor, and so is the difference between rape and consensual sex.

Re:It's good to see.

[Hork_Monkey]

I think you're missing the point. It is an excellent method for triage. Let say that you seize 20 computers/hard drives in an investigation. You get hits on 3 of the 20 using MD5 hashes. You know which 3 devices to start your full assessment on.

While you have some theoretical points about evasion, lets come back to the real world. A full assessment is going to be performed on each of the 20 devices which would in turn verify the results of the hash comparison.

In TFA, this is compared to using a drug sniffing dog. The dog can make mistakes, but it's REASONABLE to assume that if the dog indicates there are drugs, that there are. The same applies to using MD5 hashes.

This method has been around for a long time in forensics (relatively, considering it's a fairly new field), and we haven't seen any of the techniques you've mentioned in widespread use. It's highly unlikely it will ever see widespread use, as it would require a fair amount of technical knowledge for the average person. Plus, if tools exist to do this, we'd just search for the hash of the tools.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

The bible never mentions any of those punishments for those acts. You may or may not be a hypocrite, but you are certainly an ignorant idiot.

Always funny to see the ignorant hick call someone else ignorant. Feel free to review an old testament. The crushing of testicles is in there and is in fact also a crime to use on the impure and gay should they attempt to enter a church.

Like it or not, the bible has lots of nasty stuff in it. If you don't like it, it's because you're a hypocrite.

Re:It's good to see.

[Hork_Monkey]

MD5 sucks, but it's fast. Perfectly useful in this situation.

Re:It's good to see.

[calmofthestorm]

Well, socialism is when the government runs everything. Facism is when the government grants monopolies to corporations, which run everything. They both suck.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. Apparently you could drop a file onto their machine that happens to yield the same MD5 hash as a "known" piece of child porn, and that will draw their attention. Then there are the attempts being made in some jurisdictions to force ISPs to screen their traffic for transfer of files by using hashes (according to a recent /. article, anyway). Even if they eventually find nothing, finding a file with an identical hash to an illegal file could put someone in a world of investigative hurt.

Someone needs to really get these people up to speed on the significance of hash collisions, and fast.

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

To be blunt, I said that they aren't competent, not that they aren't capable. Maybe you're the one ten year old capable of entering into a mature, adult sexual relation with another ten year old, in between arguing over pokemon cards and trying to keep good grades in elementary school. I don't believe you, but it's theoretically possible that you're the Ubermensch.

And really? A ten year old is going to manage a relationship and behave responsibly, never mess up the birth control, not get weird, possessive, possibly abusive? And is going to do this under conditions where the relationship must, at all costs, remain secret?

Still doesn't matter, because if the birth control fucks up and the female half gets pregnant, whoops, someone's body is fucked for life.

Just because you did it and survived doesn't make it an ok thing to do. It is just not ever going to be ok to let ten year olds have sex. Period.

Re:It's good to see.

[calmofthestorm]

Technically, it's easy to find two files with the same md5. It is more difficult to find, given an image, another image with the same md5.

Regardless, you're correct that md5 is not a cryptographically secure hash and another should be used. Still, the md5 will match iff the file does, so a false positive could then be tested by more accurate means.

Re:It's good to see.

[Shadow Wrought]

I'll try again. What is it that is RIGHT ? I think prosecuting people who prey on children, under the law, with all the protections of the Constitution and Due Process is the right thing to do. What you wrote, to me, implied that that is NOT the right thing to do. That is a societal over-reaction. That we are mindless herd driven by fear. So, all I'm asking for, is what you think is the RIGHT thing to do with people who sexual prey on children?

You don't think my idea is right, that's fine. But simply saying "You're wrong," isn't very helpful. If you have a better idea, that would be great. At the end of the day we may very disagree, but isn't that just as important to a healthy society? That people can disagree?

Re:It's good to see.

[immcintosh]

Yes, it is a good system. Why? Because it minimizes the possibility of creating additional victims, rather than maximizing the possibility of punishing established ones. The moral judgment--one I agree with very strongly--being that it is more important NOT to punish the innocent than it is to punish the guilty. There is no perfect system, but ideally ours is constructed to that end.

A system that seeks to punish the guilty whatever the cost is the one you should truly fear.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am taking the final course in a digital forensics programme and this article and ruling are particularly timely. During this course will are expected to analyze disk images, using a variety of forensic acquisition and examination tools, for "contraband" though the actual stuff is perfectly legal.

Re:It's good to see.

[Dog-Cow]

I find it funny that you think of Godwin as some kind of diety, whose wrath must be avoided at all costs.

Funny as in sad. Really, who let you get past your first birthday with a mind so clearly defective?

Re:It's good to see.

[Ihmhi]

If you have a picture of a kid a day before his 18th birthday and a day after, what's the huge difference that makes you a heinous pervert vs. just another horney guy?

FThe Law.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

haha.

Frothing. Check.

Flesh rending. Check.

Totally irrational. Check.

Must be nice to live inside your world.

Re:It's good to see.

[rewt66]

"Harassment" is exactly what due process is to protect the innocent from. It's not to protect them from being found guilty, it's to protect them from having to spend years and/or thousands to clear their name when they shouldn't have to clear their name at all.

Re:It's good to see.

[BenEnglishAtHome]

There are states where 16 is legal. However, the Protect Act will kick in if the partner is under 18. We have one Supreme Court Justice who went on record as saying the age ought to be set at 12, so opinions vary widely about how things *ought* to be. Thus, the laws on the subject are a crazy-quilt of seemingly conflicting provisions.

Just a few years ago, the age in Hawaii was 14. It's a cultural conflict thing that would take too long to explain, but a few people got up in arms about it and claimed that Hawaii was in danger of becoming a haven for perverts. Notwithstanding the fact that a significant portion of the population felt that the age of 14 was set too HIGH already (there's that cultural thing) and that the governor went on record as saying the legislation addressed a non-existent problem, the law was changed and the age of consent was raised. What was most interesting about the change was the way the proponents of the change acted like anyone who disagreed with them was a sub-human pervert not worth debating. There was just no allowance AT ALL made for any discussion. If you didn't go along with the change, you were a closeted molestor. Period.

I found the whole tenor of that process quite unseemly and essentially anti-democratic. I guess it's true what they say about people who love the law or sausages shouldn't see how they're made.

Re:It's good to see.

[bzipitidoo]

I also find this "hang 'em high" attitude troubling.

Those who used and abused real children for porn or any other purpose are the ones who should be in trouble. Think Oliver Twist. I have heard that in Africa, some have used children as soldiers, training them to commit atrocities, and even occasionally using them on suicide bombing missions. Next to that, the transgression of merely having data seems pretty mild. That crime may be on the order of buying diamonds from murderous regimes. I have heard of some countries (Indonesia) imposing the death penalty not only for dealing drugs but simply for using them, so desperate were they to stop the damage drugs were doing to their society. I can't see child porn reaching quite that level of danger to society.

The data may not even have been purposely collected or known about by the holder, and that person is therefore just as much a victim if railroaded into jail over it. Many have pointed out this possibility.

There are many other possibilities. Suppose the data is actually pediatric medical records? We might have a respected children's doctor behind bars or even shot before anyone realizes it's a mistake.

Suppose the possessor of the data really is into child porn. But what if the pictures are all generated, and no children were involved in any way in the making? Then what? Or, what if we discover a way to "cure" pedophilia? I would guess many pedophiles hate themselves, and wish they didn't find children attractive, and would jump on such a cure if it existed. Alcoholics have similar feelings about their cravings. But of course impossible to cure someone if they've already been hastily executed in a fit of righteous indignation.

Re:It's good to see.

[networkBoy]

+1 lovely (though, the GP does largely make valid points)

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is: anyone trying to hide that kind of junk is able to (I hope I haven't just started a new AES vulnerability flame) so MD5 or any other way of hashing is just good enough for what it's conceived: detecting stupid b******s.
Of course, I agree with that court.

Re:It's good to see.

[kvezach]

No. The break against MD5 is not a preimage attack, it's a collision attack. This means you can pad two files so that MD5(a + pad1) = MD5(b + pad2). It doesn't mean that you can make a file so that MD5(a + pad) = MD5(b) - not in anything less than 2^64 expected time and space, anyway.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to spot the difference.

+1, Informative:
How about the Nazis themselves? Their writings are available from libraries with a decent history section.

-1, Flamebait
How about the Nazis themselves? Their writings are available from libraries with a decent history section. Go educate yourself, and shut the fuck up until you do.

Re:It's good to see.

[plover]

"Think of the children, especially after they have grown up to be adults who have to live with this insane idea."

Re:It's good to see.

[Thiez]

> So, go out and make a program that will automatically change a few bits in each file in a directory. Make it a TSR, and watch for all files in a directory. Sell it, profit.

Might I suggest you check the filetype before changing a few bits? For many files such as executables, encrypted files, and compressed files, changing a few bits is going to be rather annoying.

How about a searching for image/video files and using knowledge of the file format to make small changes (change a few pixels by 1 bit or something like that)?

Re:It's good to see.

[Thiez]

> The big problem with this database is that one has to be a member of a law enforcement agency to gain access to it, so there is no way of knowing what else is being classified as "bad", nor is there anyway that a reputable provider can create an application that can protect the user from accidentally downloading something illegal.

Assuming have a large number of 'evil' hashes, then what are the odds that none of these hashes match one or more legal files, given the size of the intertubes? Also, the provider would have to download the complete file themselves to calculate the hash, and you would have to wait until their download was ready before they could tell you wether you should download that particular file. Especially for larger files the delay would be unacceptable.

You could run an application locally, but that would be useless because, like the provider, you'd have to download the file to be able to check its hash.

Re:It's good to see.

[rantingkitten]

you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".

Seems to me that's the whole point of having a judge -- a human element who can decide whether the punishment really fits the crime, or if a crime was even committed. Your assertion about "good faith" is fine and I mostly agree, but unfortunately there are too many types who just want to throw the book at anyone who violates any infraction -- whether it's having a picture of some girl a day before her eighteenth birthday, or going one mile an hour over the speed limit.

That's precisely why we need judges -- good ones -- to make these kinds of calls. If you base everything on hard limits and either/or statements, we might as well just scrap it all and replace the judge with a database that spits out a punishment based on the charge if the defendant is found guilty, and save ourselves the tax-funded salaries of these guys. (The fact that far too many judges STILL act this way is incidental to my utopian view.)

As for the specific issue at hand, I think the entire thing needs to be revisited and rethought. In most states I believe the age of consent is 16. There's something pretty dumb about a system that says it's okay for you to have sex with a 16 year old, but the minute you break out the camera, suddenly you're an evil, evil pervert and you're corrupting her innocence. I'm not saying the age of being able to be in pornography should be lowered, nor am I saying the age of sexual consent should be raised -- I'm just observing the contradictory views the law establishes for this, and many other things.

Re:It's good to see.

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

I've seen DOS being used in a business this year.

DOS ain't dead!

Re:It's good to see.

[ffflala]

In particular, when we get to the 17-yo case, it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age? If yes, you should be home free. We're talking reasonable doubt here. It's reasonable to think a 17-yo is 18 or 19.

All US states that I know of explicitly disallow the "but I thought she was legal" defense, even if the minor showed you a fake ID.

Re:It's good to see.

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

1. The authorities could have the JPEG converted to a PPM, and md5 that. Messing with exif tags won't work. Image fingerprinting will come into play. If I can get a song on the radio ID'd by my cellphone I'm sure the above is doable.
2. Citation please. MD5 is NOT that broken.
3. An MD5 hit would be used for screening, not conviction. The file would be examined. A key lime pie recipie with a gigabyte of junk on the end might match the MD5 (it might take 3 years to craft it up), but would be recognizable as not being an illegal file.
You can't choose a file to collide with another file's hash. It takes a LONG time to get such a file, even with md5's flaws. And the file is completely meaningless junk, or perhaps something with meaning and a lot of junk on the end. As for planting evidence, that can of course be done, but the file must be illegal, not the MD5. Know the difference between a screening test and a confirmatory test. TSA stopped me because some keys and quarters made the machine beep in the airport. That was a screening test, and they did a shoe test with the tape and the machine that costs more than a house - the confirmatory test. I'm not a terrorist - but the false positive wasn't a problem (I should hate the TSA for having to wait for 2 minutes, right... otherwise I'm a right winger, eh?) - as long as the confirmatory test doesn't have that issue. You get a hit on the screen - you check the file or the shoes, as the case may be. Easy.

The court did the right thing by invoking the 4th Amendment for an MD5. No need to go off the deep end...

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Supply and demand.

Stop the demand, stop the supply. Stop the supply, stop the abuse.

Posting AC since I don't want the perverts after me.

Re:It's good to see.

[Thiez]

> Can anyone point me to research on how much and what kinds of hurt tend to lead to good education? That would be a very hard study, since "good education" is so hard to measure, but surely someone has made at least an initial stab at it?

I tried the stabbing thing but my children didn't become any smarter. It would appear stabbing is not the right kind of hurt.

Re:It's good to see.

[MarkRose]

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

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

If he shot you from his porch and no one came to pick up your body, would it be a case of Terminate and Stay Resident?

Re:It's good to see.

[clint999]

You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it.

Re:It's good to see.

[zunicron]

Definitely. Some children like to star in pornos, and I respect that.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. :D

But seriously, it doesn't matter if they couldn't run them. The fact of the matter is you would no longer be able to.

If you think the government takes things to actually USE them you're sadly missing the point.

Re:It's good to see.

[Pichu0102]

I consider Justice against those who prey on children to be the right thing to do. I'm not sure what exactly it is you have against that. Are you saying that child pornography should be legal? Is that what you are trying to imply? If so than I would vigorously disagree.

And now we see exactly what your protestations of outrage are really all about. You would force the rest of us to stand to attention behind you or risk having the vilest of accusations thrown directly against us. You are a pitbull of social reactionaries who will use any weapon, no matter how odious, to chip away at the foundations of our free society and who will without conscience pass within a hair's breath of libel so as to cut most deeply without risk to yourself.

You, and people like you, are destroying the western world, one pointing finger at a time.

You seem to forget that the less outrage you use against such a thing, the more likely people are likely to see you as one of THEM.
And when being even thought of as "one of THEM" can lead to harassment and even being killed, it's easy to see why people are so rabid to call for the deaths of "them" so they can spare themselves.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

The French and others have an entirely different concept of justice that doesn't give a rats ass about individual rights but instead seeks to arrive at the truth.

Which is just nifty up until those with power become corrupt enough to exploit the system against individuals.

jails are too soft.

Too crowded, you mean. If the Japanese had the same prison population density we have here in America, under those conditions, there'd be nothing but riots and murders. You'd never be able to let anyone out of prison ever again.

Re:It's good to see.

[Pichu0102]

I don't like presidents that spy on Americans, and feel that it's in my best interest that Bush be brought to trial, but I don't see any slavering "conservative" mobs backing me up. It's much more likely that she'll live in a police state than she'll be molested by a stranger.

You speak as if a police state protects it's citizens any more than a normal one as a tradeoff.

Re:It's good to see.

[Pichu0102]

Honestly, I'd have to question the humanity of someone who is NOT outraged by any crime against a child,

So we should form a mob against anyone who dares to offend a child? How about spanking? Public scolding? I'm sure those are crimes in some areas, and doing those to children means it needs outrage and raving mobs, right?

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that include cruel and unusual punishment?

There are plenty of cases where people without any history of abuse or crime have been thrown in jail for 20+ years for possessing an image of a minor.

That's silly.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the death penalty in cases of rape or child abuse is simple, if the perp faces the same penalty (death) whether he kills the victim, or just makes them wish they were dead, then what will stop them from just eliminating the only witness to their crime (the victim)? The death penalty in non-capital cases will cause more victims to be killed.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a terrible technique and here is why.

Changing a file's MD5 is a simple project that any college level programmer can do. Read in the file's headers. There are quite a few headers that are unused quite often. Write the string "This is not kiddie porn" into one of them and poof the MD5 is COMPLETELY different.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

14teen year olds fuck

18 is only the age in the USofnazi

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

Ah, I see. Because I used the phrase "Godwin's law" as shorthand for "making unwarranted comparisons to Hitler," I must revere Godwin as a god? And my mind is defective?

<sarcasm>Ad hominem attacks sure are great! You can make them without having any idea what the hell you're talking about!</sarcasm>

Also, I'm pretty sure they don't murder mentally defective infants in my country (or, given your reasoning abilities, yours).

Re:It's good to see.

[dryeo]

That is weird. Here in Canada I remember reading (in about 1982) about a famous case where the guy picked up the girl at the bar (when the drinking age was 21) went back to her place and bonked her. Her parents came home, freaked about what their 15 yr old was doing and the guy got charged with statutory rape. The judge was very apologetic when he sentenced the poor guy to the minimum 5 yrs.
After this the law was changed so that if you honestly believed the girl was of age, that was a legitimate defense.
Not sure what the law is now though. The sex crime laws have been rewritten a few times and statutory rape isn't on the books any more, at least with that name.

Re:It's good to see.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Then the fbi will be after your list of customers (child porn collectors) because it's more complete than theirs.

I can see it now - 'please repost parts 17, 32, and 87. Thanks in advance'.

Re:It's good to see.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Ahh, the eternal whine - it's the same c'tion, since we're all potentially suspects in some crime. After all, you can always figure out who the victim of a robbery is - it's finding the robber and punishing them that's hard.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get to call strawman. Ever. You've literally done nothing but attack strawmen this whole thread. You've done nothing LIE about what everyone else has been saying. And the reason you've been doing it - the ONLY POSSIBLE reason - is because you KNOW you have no response to what was REALLY being said. That's why you'll never, ever even TRY to back up any of these accusations you've made.

Re:It's good to see.

[MaskedSlacker]

You're wrong in most jurisdictions in the US. If you are carrying a firearm in public, a police officer can require you to present your permit (I wouldn't be surprised to find that a state or two doesn't allow this, but AFAIK its universal). If you do not have the permit on you, you are in violation of the gun control law (again, might be a state or two that is less strict, but AFAIK this is universal).

So, if a law enforcement officer sees a person carrying a firearm they can demand to see the permit. No permit = probable cause. Same as when they pull you over and ask for your driver's license. No license = probable cause that you are driving illegally.

Re:It's good to see.

[Zarel]

however, with something like a digital photo, all a user has to do is make a few very minor alterations (like a small watermark) to the image and it would produce a different md5 hash--essentially exploiting the inherent design of the md5 hash algorithm--and be missed by the md5 scan. these small changes could be as simple as flipping a single bit in the file, but with a standard 24-bit RGB bitmap image, each pixel is stored as three 8 bit values representing the red, green, and blue color channels. by flipping the least significant bit in each channel, you can alter up to 1/8th (12.5%) of the file without creating any perceptible changes (to human eyes at least) to the displayed image.

another method would be to employ lossy compression schemes like JPEG image compression. convert all your images to JPEG (or if they are already JPG, just compress it again at minimal compression strength) and the MD5 hashes will be completely altered. yet another method is to resize the image by a small amount--say reduce both width and height by just 1 pixel--using bicubic interpolation to scale the image up or down would preserve the image quality while completely changing the md5 signature of the file.

all of these methods would be simple to automate and allow you to easily hide known child porn images from detection using md5 comparisons.

Why are you suggesting "minor alterations" like flipping every least significant bit, or recompressing an image? The whole point of a hash like MD5 is that it becomes unrecognizably different if you change even one bit; flipping every least significant bit is no different from flipping just one bit. Not to mention that there are many completely lossless ways to change an image file (i.e. with no visible alterations whatsoever). One is simply to append a byte to the end of the image; most image specifications are designed so that extra data at the end is ignored. Alternatively, if using an image format using indexed color (PNGs in index mode, or all GIFs), you can just reorder the index.

Re:It's good to see.

[freespac3]

Care to back up point 2? Can you please make a second file which has the same md5sum as http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-1.0.txt ? I think you are either confused about MD5 or underestimating it. It is flawed, but not that flawed.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Oh, stop the fucking poetry, you fatuous bastard. Your goddamned lofty bullshit is nothing but a red herring to allow you to launch into your shit-torrent about "the precious children". Shove the violins back up your ass and listen to your intellectual betters. You come off as though you are the one and only true champion of humanity.

The point is that the children have really nothing to live for once bitches like you have finished the Bush administration's conversion of the Constitution into a massive ball of asswipe. Due process? Right to a fair trial by jury? Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure? All of these sacred rights are as dust in the wind to zealots like you who are willing to piss away our most fundamental rights to satisfy your God-damned bloodlust.

You're the same as those spiritually jejune whores who believe in the horseshit about "free speech zones". Goddamnit -- every square inch of America is a free speech zone, according to the Constitution, you son of a bitch. Fuck you in the heart if you don't believe it.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one, not even the leftiest lefty on the left of a leftie is arguing that crimes against children are not abhorrent (maybe my grammar is though - double negatives aside).

Be calm, my friend -- you're on solid ground here. Grammatically, not even the leftiest lefty is in apposition to No one, so there is no issue with a double negative.

Re:It's good to see.

[docwatson223]

"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Messiah." I think it's more appropriate than most folks are really willing to admit; Bush and Co opened the door to expanded and tyrannical government and I suspect that an Obama presidency and a truly Liberal House and Senate will put the icing on the cake with real, old-fashioned, historical National Socialism. We already live in an era where criticism of one of the candidates leads Americans to call other Americans 'racists' or 'Fascists' or be shouted down simply for merely questioning the veracity and qualifications of a candidate who has been treated with kid gloves and, for better or for worse, looks like he's been given a free pass into the White House. For folks of an Independent mindset, we don't really have much of a choice here; we can have Bush III or we can have National Socialism. Either way, we're f**ked. At least with Bush III, I'd be able to keep my guns and not have to worry about breaking the law; under an Obamanation, I couldn't legally keep guns while I prepare to fight off the Brownshirts.

Re:It's good to see.

[xouumalperxe]

Lastly, with your approach, assuming that it is a statement of how you believe things should be, what if someone has pictures of naked 18 year olds, but was duped into thinking they were of 16 year olds and hence kiddie porn. If we're going to only look at the mental state of the perpetrator, should we send him to jail on a totally victimless crime?

The penalty might be smaller, because indeed there was no victim, but the intention to commit a crime -- and acting on that intention -- should definitely count for something. Somebody else posted this on this thread:

Parent had a great point about the labeling of child porn. When I lived in NC, a local prosecutor was caught in a federal child porn sting. The feds sent him an advertisement(snail mail) offering child porn videos. They made it clear that the videos were of minors. He bought himself a conviction when he signed a personal check and mailed in an order.

The principle behind it is the same: no actual child porn was involved at any point in time, yet it was the intent to get it that mattered.

Incidentally, I believe that the penalty for attempted murder shouldn't be lighter than the penalty for murder proper (all else being equal: manslaughter, first degree murder, etc). You shouldn't get off on a lighter sentence because you're a crappy shot, or because your victim is tough as nails.

Re:It's good to see.

[electrictroy]

>>>If I were to find a large quantity of drugs on the streets and turn it in to the police, would they need a warrant to look for fingerprints or other evidence of who owned the drugs
>>>

No they'd just charge you for the crime (possession). Isn't Prohibition fun?

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Accounts can be bought on eBay.

Re:It's good to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

A ten year old typically doesn't need to deal with birth control. We certainly didn't at the time.

Re:It's good to see.

[Arthur B.]

Ends do not justify means.

Re:It's good to see.

[manekineko2]

Incidentally, I believe that the penalty for attempted murder shouldn't be lighter than the penalty for murder proper (all else being equal: manslaughter, first degree murder, etc). You shouldn't get off on a lighter sentence because you're a crappy shot, or because your victim is tough as nails.

Well then you'll be pleased to know that is true. Generally in the US, the only difference between attempted murder and real murder is that attempted murder isn't eligible for the death penalty.

Re:It's good to see.

[Count Fenring]

And that's my freaking point.

It's rare, but there have been instances of people as young as 9 giving birth. Also, what about the possibility of disease?

You weren't responsible about it - because you weren't old enough to know better. That's what competent means in a legal context, and what I mean by it.

Re:It's good to see.

[StikyPad]

I think it's safe to assume that the actual photos in question are examined before pressing charges. A hash match was not the grounds for prosecution, rather it was grounds to scrutinize the matching files from which the hashes were generated.

An imperfect search is not worthless.. first of all, there's little to no incentive to create a false positive. That would be like dipping your nose in talcum powder when you get pulled over. It might waste the officer's time, but it's almost certainly going to bring down more scrutiny on you, which most people would rather do without.

Second, nothing about a preliminary hash comparison precludes a file-by-file manual inspection. Just because you don't find a relevant search result doesn't mean you can't keep looking. Presumably, even an investigator realizes this, and running a hash check is just a method to save time by finding that needle in the haystack with the least amount of time/effort/money.

Third, when the Chinese researchers develop a collision mechanism, it will not affect past results; it will only bring future results into question. Nonetheless, it will still be mostly irrelevant, because the hash itself is not the evidence; it just points to the evidence.

In conclusion, this case is not at all the same as RIAA cases where offenders are identified by IP and song titles. The police actually have the files in their possession (albeit sans warrant in this case) and the hash methodology is merely used to expedite a search. The method is sound, as was the decision that it constitutes a search and thus requires a warrant.

Re:It's good to see.

[Tubal-Cain]

To quote from GP post:

some of the worst

Re:It's good to see.

[ultranova]

by flipping the least significant bit in each channel, you can alter up to 1/8th (12.5%) of the file without creating any perceptible changes (to human eyes at least) to the displayed image.

Or just alter the EXIF metadata a little. It isn't noticeable at all, since it isn't part of actual image data, and will result in a completely different hash.

Re:It's good to see.

[flajann]

You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".

In particular, when we get to the 17-yo case, it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age? If yes, you should be home free. We're talking reasonable doubt here. It's reasonable to think a 17-yo is 18 or 19. If it was publicized as kiddie porn in any way, I don't care if she's 15 or day shy of 18. You had the information available, you're screwed.

The problem with "setting the bar somewhere" is that the moral implications becomes ambiguous. Even if someone knew a model was 17 years and 364 days old, do you honestly think that person should go to jail for years where if the model was a single day older, nothing would come of it?

The spirit of the law is lost on a technicality, and therefore becomes a meaningless rule we are forced to follow, like mindless drones.

Re:It's good to see.

[flajann]

You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it.

Begging the question.

Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".

Many legal rules are not clear cut, that's why judges are not computers.

First of all, penal law is immoral, only the victims should have a claim against their aggressor. The victim should present the damage in front of a judge, establish the lack of consent, and the verdict set accordingly.

Child molesters cause terrible harm, and should be punished accordingly. It is however less obvious that the average pedophile pervert who consumes the product of these crimes commits a real crime himself. While they deserve contempt it is unclear if they deserve jail.

The real case in the situation where someone for free downloads kiddie porn off the Internet from some public area, is, who is the victim? Does a person, by way of downloading something for free, actually is *doing harm* to that victim in the photograph or video? The kid is not aware of this download, and is most likely on some other part of the planet, not in the neighbourhood. So, how is harm actually being done in concrete terms?

On the other hand, if a person *uploads* the same, that's a wholly different matter.

Next comes the issue of territory. It may be legal in the country of origin, say, for a 16 year old model to exhibit his or her body, and yet the mere possession of that artefact would still be considered "illegal" in the U.S. If it is not considered harmful in the country of origin, why should it still be considered "harmful" in this country?

Well, this is why I never went into law. There seems to be no logical consistency whatsoever with the law.

Re:It's good to see.

[flajann]

Your attitude scares me. Nobody should be flayed and burned at all, much less where they stand.

Everybody deserves a trial. And everybody who is found guilty at a trial deserves punishment which is not cruel or unusual.

At the risk of Godwinning the thread, they didn't flay or burn the top Nazi leadership. They gave them trials, then hanged or imprisoned them. These people were responsible for far worse crimes than "taking advantage" of a single five-year-old child, but we didn't think that their punishment should exceed the law.

I'm sorry, but if I come across a guy in the act of raping a 5-year-old, there simply won't much left of that guy for the cops to arrest when they finally get there.

Be scared all you want but if I see anyone *in the act* of harming another, I am NOT going to wait around for law enforcement or any of that. Head will be smashed, bones will be broken, whatever it takes. If I am "bad" for responding a situation of that nature, then I'll be "bad" every damned time. I am sure the victim will appreciate my "badness" 100,000%!

Re:It's good to see.

[flajann]

If you are 16 years old and consent to having sex with a 22 year-old, there should be no "crime" there. The 16-year-old is not exactly a "child" in the same way an 8-year-old is.

There are "mature minor" statues on the books in many states with regards to where the kid wishes to live in the case of divorced parents, and that age is around 13 or 14. There are strong reasons for having such laws on the books.

And if that is the case with that, why should it be any different?

Re:It's good to see.

[Free the Cowards]

You should realize that this is vigilante justice, and that the law should not follow your "fine" example. Furthermore, you should realize that in the heat of the moment you may misinterpret the situation and end up beating or even killing an innocent man.

If you are fine with this, then so be it. But don't think that the justice system should imitate you. You have far more to fear from corrupt cops than child molesters, and any legal system should protect us foremost from the former.

Re:It's good to see.

[Arthur B.]

Law is an absolute, when unclear it should be discovered by the judge, not decided by governments. Once you realize that, most of the logical inconsistencies vanish. Some government laws happen to be right, some happen to be wrong. Consider the different laws tentatives to approximate natural law... and look at the intersection preferably :)

Re:It's good to see.

[flajann]

You should realize that this is vigilante justice, and that the law should not follow your "fine" example. Furthermore, you should realize that in the heat of the moment you may misinterpret the situation and end up beating or even killing an innocent man.

If you are fine with this, then so be it. But don't think that the justice system should imitate you. You have far more to fear from corrupt cops than child molesters, and any legal system should protect us foremost from the former.

I don't think there is any way in hell I can misinterpret a grown man's penis inside of a 5-year-old. Yes, it would have to be that certain for me to go, as you say, "vigilante". There would have to be absolutely *no doubt*.

On the other hand, I know all about corrupt, trigger-happy, prevaricating cops. They have been the bane of my existence. Cops can and do lie under oath in court; and as such, there can be no real justice. You never know for sure if the poor guy is guilty or if the cops are making it up, perhaps framed him, etc.

When "law enforcement" turns against the innocent, all bets are off. You are absolutely correct. I've had far more trouble with idiot, corrupt, dishonest cops than I have ever had with real criminals. Funny thing is real criminals almost never bother me. Cops always do. Hmmm. What is wrong with this picture?

Re:It's good to see.

[flajann]

Law is an absolute, when unclear it should be discovered by the judge, not decided by governments. Once you realize that, most of the logical inconsistencies vanish. Some government laws happen to be right, some happen to be wrong. Consider the different laws tentatives to approximate natural law... and look at the intersection preferably :)

Wrong. You replace the logical inconsistencies of the law with the logical inconsistencies, misconceptions, and personal attitudes of the judge. Still frelled up.

Re:It's good to see.

[Arthur B.]

Nowhere am I claiming the judge is infallible. But a judge trying to match natural law will do a better job that a legislative body with no concern for natural law.

Re:It's good to see.

[flajann]

Nowhere am I claiming the judge is infallible. But a judge trying to match natural law will do a better job that a legislative body with no concern for natural law.

When you find such a judge, please let me know.

Re:It's good to see.

[RhadamanthosIsChaos]

Even if your attack for #2 worked (which according to a post at the same level as mine, it does not), the article stated that the officer then immediately went into the program's "Gallery Mode", presumably to, ah, "confirm" that the files were what they said they were...

Re:It's good to see.

[badkarmadayaccount]

...so desperate were they to stop the damage drugs were doing to their society...

Considering your sig, thats the pinnacle of irony. How is saying what does and what does not go into one's body, not tyranny over it, and, considering the context (psychoactive substances), over the mind of the said one? And may I ask, what damage, beyond that inflicted by the law itself?

Re:It's good to see.

[huckamania]

People don't riot when they have been busting rocks every day. They are just happy to get their fish head, bowl of rice and a chance to be sitting down.

Re:It's good to see.

[SkipRosebaugh]

That is exactly his point; he's decrying the need to use outrage to avoid being tarred with a sympathizer brush.

Re:It's good to see.

[Schadrach]

So, "police should be able to search anything, anytime, anyways, due cause or not, and if they happen to find something then it sticks and they just say that they are sorry for violating the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure?" then? Or was this fine so high that it was *never* worth it to violate the highest law in the land in order to secure a conviction (or simply torment someone, or any of a hundred other ways that unrestrained search and seizure can be abused)?

Re:It's good to see.

[pclminion]

Yes, due process protects the innocent. And under US law, everyone is (or perhaps "should be" is more accurate nowadays) innocent until a judge decides they have been proven guilty. It doesn't matter how sure the cops are that you're guilty; there must be due process until the end of the trial.

You are either guilty or you are not. Before judgement this is not known, but it doesn't change. Due process exists to protect the defendent in case he is innocent, and guilt can't be determined without that due process. But the point is not to provide protection for those who are ultimately found guilty. It ensures that a system is in place which attempts to prevent the innocent from being punished.

that's basically what they were doing.

[yincrash]

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

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[grapes911]

And why did the technicians generating the md5's not know this? I'm all for the ruling, but how hard would it have been for someone to stand up and say, "We got this guy, but let's get a warrant before we scan his hard drive."

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[DeepDarkSky]

Very true. It's almost like simply taking a picture of evidence in a residence after busting down the door, even though there's no search warrant to search the residence.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[autocracy]

I think it's likely they know. It's possible that they didn't bother with the warrant because the computer was handed over by some other party. Now they're trying to still use it in court. Stupid to not get the warrant, though.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, hashing all "known offending pictures" is a stupid idea anyways... All that needs to be done is alter 1 whole bit of the image file (hell, shift the color of a random pixel 1 shade) and it's impossible for them to find it unless you upload your new file into a database.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[blitzkrieg3]

That's what I don't understand. IANAL, but how is this different than just simply opening the images or videos of the CP? You have to access the hard drive either way.

Which stage was the search - the creating the duplicate? The running of the hash? It's not really clear.

I would say creating the image counts as a search, since you have to actually go in and read the data from his hard drive.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

"We got this guy, but let's get a warrant before we scan his hard drive."

The odd thing is that the computer was in the landlord's friend's friend's (brother's dogwalker's sister-in-law's... whoops, got carried away) possession having been seized during the eviction. The vast majority of precedent (used whenever the government wants data from phone companies and mail servers, etc) says that if the guy with the data freely gives it to the cops, they don't need no steenkin warrant.

While the overall decision is welcome (that the government can't just force their way into my house and hash my drive on a whim), the method by which the decision was arrived at is unsound, and will almost certainly be overturned on the grounds that it wasn't the pedophile's drive anymore, therefore the pedophile had no standing to object to the search.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[PJ1216]

But then they'll also point out its difficult to prove the pedophile had put the pictures there. If there was an extended amount of time outside of his control, who knows what someone could have done. Its easy to make the argument that someone is trying to set him up. May or may not be true, but it does cast doubt unless there isn't other evidence backing it up.

In either case, I at least like the idea that they say calculating MD5s is considered protected by the 4th.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[nahdude812]

The landlord's friend's friend didn't own the laptop. He can no more authorize a search of it than your landlord can authorize a search of the apartment he rents to you.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[Artifakt]

Or looking for a file to calculate its hash is itself the search. Consider an old fashioned search of a hard drive, as it would likely be done by amateurs. The first step would probably be to use a file manager and look at the names of files themselves to see if any sounded like child porn. Notice that I said the first step, not the zeroeth step. We don't say that a person browsing a directory hasn't started searching the drive until they open the first file, that's generally at least the second step.
        There are all sorts of actions before examining a single file in detail that should still count as searching the drive. For example identifying what sort of programs can open the data files is a step in some searches. On a Windows box, making sure a required .DLL actually exists, or for any box, making sure required codecs exist, is a routine part of a criminal forensics investigation (It's often handy to be able to show in court that the owner of a machine could actually play back a file, to avoid them claiming they didn't know what the file was, couldn't get it to work, and only left it on their machine because they thought it was something legal and they might get somebody to help them view it later.). So, if an investigator reads a directory, looks at file extensions for some files and checks to see if there's something that can play back those files, and maybe reads a few .ini files or the Windows registry to find a recently played list, should he be able to claim he hasn't started a search yet because he hasn't actually double clicked the first incriminating file yet?.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

But you only took a peek, and just jotted down the jist of it! Come on! Don't let a goddamn piece of paper stand in the way of a good wholesome lynching!

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[Cajun Hell]

I wouldn't rely on that argument to keep this from happening in the future. They could have some private third party generate the hashes and then the government could look through the hash list. Or it's not hard to imagine a filesystem with some high-level call that returns the hash given an inode, so that they aren't looking at the file; the system is. Such a call could even return a stored answer that was calculated when the file was written instead of when they call it, so that no actual file reading happens at the time the government looks at the computer.

Instead of looking at it as "they have to read the file to generate the hash," I'd look at it as "the hash is a form of representation of the file." If they're picking through your hashes, they're picking through your hashes.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[DavidTC]

Landlords have different 'possession' of renter's stuff than people others have loaned stuff to. Depending on the state, they can sometimes authorize searches, sometimes they can't, sometimes property left behind becomes theirs, but only after X days, etc.

Just because the landlord was legally holding the drive doesn't mean he could legally authorize a search of it. Or, possibly he could, but he couldn't legally give it away, which he did, and that person thus couldn't authorize a search.

It sounds like the police thought they needed a warrant, or they wouldn't have gone through the silliness of an 'MD5 search' to start with.

OTOH, I thought someone testifying to a judge 'I saw child porn on this computer' was enough for a warrant in the first place, regardless of the ownership rights. That's what happened here. I mean, it sounds like probable cause to me.

Incidentally, why did the judge slap it down? It's possible he did it because an MD5 search requires looking (via a computer program) at every byte of the file, and thus it's hard to see how it's different than a straight up comparison. It's possible he'd have been okay with a filename comparison.

Of course, as someone else pointed out, the chain of custody at this point is near nonsense. A friend of a friend of the landlord. They couldn't prove whose files those were anyway, especially as at least one of the people, the landlord, is plausibly hostile to the person who failed to pay his rent.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[BigGar']

Perhaps, the decision may get overturned on appeal for that reason then.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[Count Fenring]

No guarantee that the technicians had the legal know-how, or the desire to do anything other than finish the job and go home.

It's not their responsibility, in the end. They might not even be privy to whether there's a warrant or not.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[Count Fenring]

While correct (I believe, in the case of both the laptop and the apartment) on the practical matter, the apartment thing is more a case of residence statutes, rather than ownership. After all, the landlord DOES own the apartment he rents to you.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[u38cg]

Erm, because any law enforcement organisation with an ounce of clue has very strict procedures on evidence handling and chain of custody so that this approach doesn't work. It's been tried, and succeeded on several occasions, until the cops learnt their lesson.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[zippthorne]

Further, surely the imaging (or the initial hash, which presumably was to provide evidence that the drive or image wasn't subsequently tampered with in police custody) of the drive is the search, and the part that actually requires a warrant. Or it ought to be. Calculating hashes, reading files, or whatever are just interpreting the data you've already collected.

Side note: The article makes it seem like they read all of the data to make a hash, then read all of the data again into an image file. Shouldn't it be designed to calculate the hash on the fly? It's like fifteen extra characters in a bash pipeline.

Re:that's basically what they were doing.

[blitzkrieg3]

Notice that I said the first step, not the zeroeth step. We don't say that a person browsing a directory hasn't started searching the drive until they open the first file, that's generally at least the second step.

How do you figure that? If I titled a file 'How I killed my wife on 10/11/2008' it would certainly be incriminating evidence. Evidence that shouldn't be admissible in court.

help please

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot janitors are of no use.

Why the hell are the stories pushed all the way down to the bottom of the page in Firefox 3.0.1?

The Sections menu and the Slashboxes are taking up a lot of real estate and leaving dead space to scroll through to reach the submitted articles.

Re:help please

[Anonymous Coward]

Not having this problem, same version.

Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[betterunixthanunix]

This sounds like the worse possible way to search for kiddie porn, because a suspect who wanted to conceal his activities could just change a single pixel, and the entire hash would change. They would need a signature method that doesn't change dramatically when a single bit changes, like something based on a frequency analysis.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

This sounds like the worse possible way to search for kiddie porn, because a suspect who wanted to conceal his activities could just change a single pixel, and the entire hash would change. They would need a signature method that doesn't change dramatically when a single bit changes, like something based on a frequency analysis.

Or they can just look at the pictures. At least, that's the way it used to be done.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[aproposofwhat]

Would you expect the sort of sad-sack who gets his jollies from kids to understand that?

Now that this case has highlighted the use of hash values, I'm sure some of the more intelligent kiddy-fiddlers will start to modify the images, but the vast majority of perverts will still be caught.

Nice idea for a different sort of signature, though - perhaps it might be a good project to highlight the usefulness of Open Source.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems easier than it is. Manually changing a pixel on a thousand images is way too much work. And how can it be made automatic? I don't want stray pixels on my child's penis.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[purpledinoz]

You're assuming that the suspect is a computer geek. 95% of the people don't even know what a hash is (in the computer sense). This is a good automated way of searching. However, if they run into someone who is a computer expert, the authorities will probably face decrypting volumes.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[gnick]

I would assume that this is just a "first pass" search. Many criminals will simply be too lazy to flip a bit (how many confessed copyright violators out there take the time to flip a bit on their ill-gotten mp3s or avis?) It's a quick, easy search with bullet-proof results. After you scan for known hashes, you search for '.jpg', '.gif', etc. even though simply changing the extension on a file would elude that search technique - Many people will leave them intact so that they're easier to view. That search is more time-intensive because somebody actually has to look at the list and see if there's anything named '3yo_covered_hot_grits.jpg' or, alternatively, actually open a bunch of stuff up and look at thumbnails. From there you can imagine any number of more involved search techniques, but you get my point.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Chyeld]

More than likely the hashes are generated against the picture not the file data, and are 'fuzzy' enough that minute changes in the image are ignored. That was many 'Usenet duplicate image detectors' do. For instance, one of the old programs I used to use did this:

* Render image and convert it to grayscale.
* Resize image to 128x128 or some other 'thumbnail' size.
* Create a hash based on the thumbnail.

You'd have to mangle a picture a good amount for it not to show up as a positive match. The problem is you'd have a good number of false positives. On the other hand, if you are using this as a fishing expedition to find an excuse for a more through search, that really isn't a problem... is it?

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[eosp]

A lot of formats have places that you can modify that don't actually change the picture. For example, if I recall correctly, appending anything to a GIF won't change it (but will leave it valid).

In addition, you can normally just open it up and re-save it; that will often change the hash without changing the data. (Don't do this too much with JPEGs, of course.)

And I suspect that find(1) and ImageMagick will solve most such needs.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need a stray pixel on your child's penis. You need to flip a single low-order bit somewhere. Maybe a few pixels on your child's penis become a slightly different shade of pink. it doesn't matter.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[blitzkrieg3]

The point is that most people don't think about this that much, and that most people won't bother to change that bit. After all, the guy got caught using the md5sum, didn't he?

Just because the tool will not catch all CP videos doesn't mean that it's ineffective.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Ambiguous Coward]

And I suspect that find(1) and ImageMagick will solve most such needs.

Ohhhhh, I get what you're saying: those tools are used by child pornography consumers and producers in order to circumvent law enforcement agencies' efforts. All right, fair enough. New legislation outlawing those tools in 3, 2, 1...

-G

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[betterunixthanunix]

Keep in mind that pædophilia does not imply a lack of intelligence or a lack of knowledge. We like to think of pædophiles as these sad, sick men who look creepy and go around unshaven, but the reality is that a lot of them appear perfectly normal, and some hold jobs in the computer industry. Such people would very quickly realize that they could defeat a system based on hash signatures by merely modifying a single low-order bit in some random position in the image. Worse, if the people at the production and distribution levels realize this, it will not take a long time before the process is automated and a pædophile looking for images has images with random low-order bits changed.

An open source frequency analysis project would be pretty cool, and it would probably have applications beyond simple police work.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[blitzkrieg3]

Or they can just look at the pictures. At least, that's the way it used to be done.

That's kind of the point. For some reason the courts used to think that looking at the pictures would count as search w/o a warrant, but comparing files against known md5 hashes wouldn't. By running the md5 hashes, the detective had a way to prosecute this guy w/o getting a search warrant. This ruling effectively puts a stop to that.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[aswtech]

Hash code writers need to get busy on new algorithms that are robust and not subject to the Birthday Attack.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[2short]

But then you can't pretend it's not a search and you don't need a warrant.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[avandesande]

I kind of doubt that if there is a ton of evidence that someone is downloading this stuff they would stop at using a hash; they probably use several different techniques.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Kokuyo]

You seem to believe that all consumers of kiddie porn are computer literate uber haxx0rs.

Have you ever downloaded a porn collection via BitTorrent or the likes? I'd imagine if you know a few guys who know a few guys who can get you in touch with this stuff, then you'll have a few thousand individual pictures or some dozen movie snippets in no time. How is Joe Regular supposed to edit one pixel in all of them without quitting his job? Hell, I am not sure myself how I'd tackle such a project.

The idea in and of itself isn't so bad. And I do think it's a good thing the judge got wise on this case and seemed to understand the technical implications.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[avandesande]

Assuming you are not a pervert, how much would someone have to pay you to look through CP all day? What effect would this have on your mental health?

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think that the criminals would be lazy and stupid but the comedian Doug Stanhope received a CREEEEEPY email from a fan who responded to him making a joke about pedophiles that was very enlightening. The writer mentioned how the internet had made all the pedos go super-high tech in terms of encryption and anonymity. Multiple proxies and anonymous remailers seemed to be at their backbone. The guy also mentioned that he had a collection ranging in terabytes and that he didn't have a large collection compared to others.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[treeves]

A "fuzzy hash"? Seems like an oxymoron. Maybe I don't understand.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Dragon of the Pants]

I thought we'd grown out of the mindset that criminals were stupid. Having a mental disorder that makes you want to have sex with children or murder people and chop them in to bits doesn't preclude a person from having a high education or a brilliant mind. I could start citing examples, but I really don't think I need to.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[GenP]

ImageMagick and a shell script?

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[hattig]

Except in this case they used MD5, not a fuzzy image matching algorithm.

I think it makes sense as a first run after you have your search warrant to find child porn. And I hope they were using a copy of the drive to keep the first intact. And that the datestamps were also recorded. And that no-one else had access to the computer in the time after it left the accused.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[silent_artichoke]

You don't look for extensions. Those are trivial to change as you pointed out. Look for file headers.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

So all some "advanced perp" has to do is change the names of files and run it through a filter or two and totally confound the investigators -- or slow his case down tremendously.

Really Smart Perps will simply encrypt the files or the entire drive and that's that.

So, the system is mostly geared to catch only the stupid criminals. Smart ones will never even show up on the radar screen. But then, that's the way it normally is with "Law Enforcement" -- they will never catch anyone above their own IQ level!!!

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

But then you can't pretend it's not a search and you don't need a warrant.

Oh, leave it up to "our finest" to find new and renowned ways to circumvent our basic constitutional rights!

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Hatta]

You can just invert it for storage, then invert it again to view. That's enough to foil MD5 sums, and easy to do with ImageMagick and a shell script. Hell, you could even XOR it with random noise, then XOR it again with the same noise to view. This shit is trivial.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Hatta]

Keep in mind that pædophilia does not imply a lack of intelligence or a lack of knowledge. We like to think of pædophiles as these sad, sick men who look creepy and go around unshaven, but the reality is that a lot of them appear perfectly normal, and some hold jobs in the computer industry.

It's likely that most people with "child porn" are actually entirely normal, well adjusted adult males who enjoy looking at sexually mature females who happen to be below 18. There's nothing sick about that, it's in our genes.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

Assuming you are not a pervert, how much would someone have to pay you to look through CP all day? What effect would this have on your mental health?

Well, you have to wonder about the guys who signs up for this type of job. I think it's akin to the factor of homophobes getting turned on by homo-eroticism.

Of course, I could be purely mistaken. I mean, no way would law enforcement hire perps to look at these images, right? Of course, not!

You can always trust your friendly government to do the right thing!!

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[DarkOx]

Use a small shell script with dd to add a byte from /dev/random to the the end of each file, you could get the file size with ls and cut and use the skip, count, and bs prams on dd, put the entire thing in a for loop and get some coffee. I don't think an extra byte at the end is going to cause you any problems displaying the JPG file but it will defeat anyone trying to ID the files by md5 hash.

Now someone could get wise to what you did and fix it, by skipping the last byte themselves, but they likely would not figure that out before determining you possessed those files some other way any way. To really protect yourself you would have to change the data in the file, imagemagic could do that again in the for loop.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Creepy Crawler]

Instead of hashing the file, one would analyze the picture/movie for bone structure and basic body structure and hash that.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[thermowax]

This isn't valid shellscript, but should get the point across:

for ( each_jpg_in_porn_directory )
    { head filesize-1 $filename > $newfilename
        rm $filename
    }

All you have to do is drop one byte to change the MD5- and this will kill the last pixel, so it will be in the lower right corner. You'll never notice it.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Squeeself]

As someone that works in the industry making software that does performs search analysis, I can tell you that this is only the first pass. Hash matching finds things quickly, but doesn't find everything as you've said. There are many, many research areas going on in frequency analysis, image analysis (skin tone searches, etc.), and others. And then there's good old-fashioned viewing of files to search. Sadly, the software currently out there is WAY behind on the research. I count myself lucky working for a company that's starting to put some of this research to use. Still, hash matching is a very useful tool; remember, most criminals are dumb. Just take this case, where the guy gave his computer to a friend while it still had child porn on it. Often, the best thing they do to hide illicit files is to put them in strange (or hidden!) folders or change the file extension, both of which are easy to detect. Those that do realize that changing their files can hide them better generally have enough knowledge to, say, encrypt their files, which makes things extremely difficult anyway.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[aproposofwhat]

Paedophiles wouldn't want anything to do with a fuzzy gash...

Oh, hash?

Never mind...

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[dgatwood]

At least in this case, since the evidence came from a supposed good samaritan delivering the drive, it is unlikely the police have access to download logs or any useful ability to tap the guy's network connection. It was too late by the time they got the drive. (We won't even talk about the whole question of whether evidence obtained through a third-party seizure and delivered by a fourth party has any real validity, nor the question of whether the property was property seized by the landlord in the first place.)

IMHO, the second law enforcement reads a single block off the hard drive, it constitutes a search, whether they are viewing files, creating hashes, or merely making a copy for later analysis. That's just common sense. This ruling helps to affirm that, and as such is the only conclusion that a reasonable person could reach in this case, regardless of one's feelings about the nature of the crime in question. The moral: if you're going to examine somebody's hard drive in any way, you'd better get a warrant.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[gnick]

Most of our system is set up to catch the dumb criminals. That's where the best cost/benefit ratio lies - If you can catch 80% easily or 90% by doing 5x as much work, you have to evaluate whether the best use of those resources is chasing the additional 10%. [Numbers obviously plucked directly from nowhere.]

Catching somebody who knows what they're doing is REALLY tough. Law enforcement catching somebody "above their own IQ level", IMO, has little to do with it. Even a really bright cop will have a tough time busting a relatively dumb criminal who knows how to run TrueCrypt, wipe the free space on his drive, and is relatively paranoid about sending stuff in the open over the Internet - All easy tasks in today's world.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[mpe]

At least in this case, since the evidence came from a supposed good samaritan delivering the drive, it is unlikely the police have access to download logs or any useful ability to tap the guy's network connection. It was too late by the time they got the drive.

It's also far too late to know if the "evidence" has been tampered with. Even if the "good samaritan" is exactly what they appear to be a person with motive to harm the accused has had access to the machine.

(We won't even talk about the whole question of whether evidence obtained through a third-party seizure and delivered by a fourth party has any real validity, nor the question of whether the property was property seized by the landlord in the first place.)

We have no way of knowing who has done what with the machine. Even if the police were to follow the rules to the letter any so called "evidence" has already been tainted.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[betterunixthanunix]

That much is certainly true, although when I use the word "pædophile," I am referring to people who are attracted to non-sexually mature children. My point was that, when it comes to those people, we tend to characterize them as people who "look creepy," drive around in unmarked white vans, and live on the fringes of society, when the reality is that most of them are people one would never suspect. While I think it is sad that such people exist, and that psychologists/psychiatrists need to research the phenomenon more and find ways of treating it, there is no reason to try to characterize them as "underpeople" with absolutely no resemblance to any normal person.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[blueg3]

No, the standard databases are all MD5/SHA1 hashes. It's well-known that they're too susceptible to minute changes. However, a hash match nearly guarantees that the files are the same.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

And then there's the cases where someone downloading porn simply didn't know the models were under 18. Those caught with 17-year-old models on there hard drive will be treated the same as some real perp with 5-year-olds.

On another front, it would be all to easy to frame someone for "kiddie porn" by comprimising their computer and copying it there. All the remote technologies, all the spyware, all the trojan horses -- if someone really wanted to frell up a lot of USians he could design a special worm that would download kiddie porn to the targets' computers and delete itself, covering its tracks so well no forensic analysis would know. And the scary thing is, it would not be all that hard to do, either.

And thus you'd have innocent people marred for life, having to abide by "Megan's Law" once they have served their time for the "crime" the never committed, etc.

Creation of kiddie porn should be the thing they'd haul you away and chop off various bits for. Or if you pay for it. Mere presence on your hard drive should, in and of itself, not be enough to frell up your life.

But that's just my take on it. Many will disagree with me, of course, as the witch-hunt mentality rules in the U.S.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[LeafOnTheWind]

MD5 does not work this way. In addition, an image rendering or grayscale conversion is not a 1 to 1 mapping, meaning that similar images don't render to the same grayscale image. Resizing the image does nothing but decrease the input data while also costing CPU time to do a transformation. I'm not even sure if this is more efficient than just hashing the larger image.

More likely what they are doing is using an image matching algorithm, not a hashing function, as the second stage. Hashing is probably just a simple and quick way to weed out the idiots.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Hyppy]

The effect probably wouldn't be all too dissimilar from the effect of scraping up murder victims.

That doesn't mean that the Constitution should be ignored.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Count Fenring]

Plenty of smart people get caught, dude.

And, given that the hard drive business is about finding evidence to prove in court, not about catching them in the first place, I'd guess that it's not really going to be a deal. For one thing, the court can order you to unencrypt that volume, and while you can refuse, that refusal then becomes evidence against you.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Chyeld]

MD5 works on whatever data is fed to it. It's not a process in itself, it's a function used in the process. You can feed raw data to it, or you can pre-process that data to ensure more useful results. The function doesn't care.

And you know, given I used to use the program I was speaking of on literally millions of picture files 'harvested' out of Usenet, and it did a damn fine job of filtering out duplicates even when people had done stupid shit like converting a jpg to gif, croping and resizing, then dumping huge BBS watermarks in, I'd say it works. I'm sure these programs are a dime a dozen, but I'm fairly certain the one I used was called Odin or something similar.

The problem I had wasn't it's failure to catch duplicates but the fact that it often tagged pictures in a series as duplicates due to their simularity. Which I again point out would not be a flaw for people using these as their preliminary fishing expedition.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[sheldon]

I seem to recall an article a few years ago about how Microsoft or perhaps the Gates Foundation did the work to create this system for law enforcement. I believe it is using image matching analysis, much like facial recognition technology to identify the pictures. It's kind of like what Picasa does at google.

Now certainly if you cropped images, things like that, I'm sure this would change somewhat. Although if their hash is identifying object shapes in the picture it may not help much. The point is to maintain this database of confirmed photography, and just do a quick scan across what a suspect has on their computer to see if there are matches. The reason being is that these pictures are shared broadly. So chances are if a suspect has a collection, they aren't modifying every picture and even if they did, they probably shared the modified picture with someone else who might have gotten caught and had it put into the database.

The purpose behind the system was several fold. The main purpose was to save some poor guy from having a job doing nothing but looking at child porn all day. A second purpose was to speed searches. A third purpose was to then track where these images were appearing across the globe, and link that into another database of who these people were in contact with, and from that build a path of how this flowed with the hopes of tracking it back to the source who took the picture.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I had wasn't it's failure to catch duplicates but the fact that it often tagged pictures in a series as duplicates due to their simularity.

oooh, that would be a good way to find candidates for turning into a steroscopic 3d image. *runs off to search his pr0n collection with findimagedupes*

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Up the contrast by 1%, adjust saturation, crop a small border of the image, resize the image. All of these would result in different hashes based on your technique.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[eosp]

Okay, best get rid of Spotlight from OS X, Gimp, Photoshop, WindowsKey-F, and MS Paint.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Keep in mind that a lot of kiddy porn is teenagers - finding a 16 year old attractive is no more sick than an 18 year old that looks sort of young.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Arancaytar]

Or just confiscate and search the hard drive properly, since by the time they obtain a warrant, they must have enough of a probable cause to make it worth the time.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

Plenty of smart people get caught, dude.

And, given that the hard drive business is about finding evidence to prove in court, not about catching them in the first place, I'd guess that it's not really going to be a deal. For one thing, the court can order you to unencrypt that volume, and while you can refuse, that refusal then becomes evidence against you.

Of course, if I forget the passphrase, that's not evidence against me. And I do encrypt my drives that contain personal information or projects that I am working on, and occasionaly I *do* forget the passphrase. Most annoying when that happens.

Then there is the bit about not incriminating myself. If I plead the 5th, I don't have to say anything at all.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Count Fenring]

That's a legally questionable interpretation of the 5th amendment. They've ruled that way in Vermont, sure, but it's almost sure to be invalidated on appeal, and can't be relied on. Discussion here

Much as hashing all of your files and comparing them to a list of known hashes is searching, asking you to acquiesce to a lawful search isn't compelling you to give testimony. It's the same principle as making you open your door when there's a subpoena.

Also, your having encrypted the volumes and refused to comply with discovery on them will likely be seen as suspicious action, and be admissible as evidence itself.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

They'll have access to the bits. As to what those bits represent? What if it's just purely a random set of bits I created for reasons of entropy? A good encryption scheme would be indistinguishable from pure randomness. Am I "guilty" just for having a set of random bits on my hard drive?

If I give them the hard drive, that's all I am required to do. If they can't make heads or tails of it, that's not my problem, per se. If they want to assume my guilt because they could not make headway of a random stream of bits, than that's a miscarriage of justice.

It's the same as if they took a safe out of my house, but I forgot the combination or lost the key. There could be something in the safe incriminating; there may not be. If they want to nail me up against the wall for forgetting the combination or loosing the key, then I am living in the wrong country.

But then, it's no secret that the "Justice" System in our country is backwards, unscientific, given to political whims and the occasional witch-hunt mentality. How many people on death-row have been freed due to the "Justice" system finally applying a little science to the case? If these guys were innocent all along, how could they possibly been found guilty in the first place unless there were -- and still are -- major flaws in our system of "Justice"?

So, really, if someone is thrown up against the wall, they are screwed in any case. And so, it doesn't bloody matter.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[blitzkrieg3]

...there is no reason to try to characterize them as "underpeople" with absolutely no resemblance to any normal person.

maddox begs to differ.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Count Fenring]

Except that if the safe is in your house and is guaranteed to be yours, they DO and SHOULD have the right, with warrant, to search the contents. Otherwise, any criminal with a safe is automatically exempted from justice. For that matter, by saying that you've forgotten the combination you've committed perjury, and I believe last access time for the software might very well be accessible, even if the information on the drive isn't.

No one ever claimed the justice system is perfect. No justice system ever is or will be. It's great when science can help make more accurate decisions possible; both in allowing the innocent to remain freed, and in allowing the guilty to be caught. Saying "Oh, sometimes convictions made with worse technology have been wrong, the justice system is completely broken" ignores the fact that, well, Ted Bundy was also caught and tried and convicted. So are a bunch of muggers, rapists, and gangsters. It's not a simple case of "good/bad," it's a complicated system that, yes, needs constant supervision and reform to operate well. But stripping any ability to do search and seizure AFTER probable cause is proved and a warrant is issued isn't in anyone's interest except criminals. Period.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

Except that if the safe is in your house and is guaranteed to be yours, they DO and SHOULD have the right, with warrant, to search the contents. Otherwise, any criminal with a safe is automatically exempted from justice. For that matter, by saying that you've forgotten the combination you've committed perjury, and I believe last access time for the software might very well be accessible, even if the information on the drive isn't.

No one ever claimed the justice system is perfect. No justice system ever is or will be. It's great when science can help make more accurate decisions possible; both in allowing the innocent to remain freed, and in allowing the guilty to be caught. Saying "Oh, sometimes convictions made with worse technology have been wrong, the justice system is completely broken" ignores the fact that, well, Ted Bundy was also caught and tried and convicted. So are a bunch of muggers, rapists, and gangsters. It's not a simple case of "good/bad," it's a complicated system that, yes, needs constant supervision and reform to operate well. But stripping any ability to do search and seizure AFTER probable cause is proved and a warrant is issued isn't in anyone's interest except criminals. Period.

Many commit perjury in court all the time -- including the police. Few, if any, are ever punished for it.

In my experiences, I have been falsely accused more times than I can count. All my life, actually. Each and every accusation was simply false, but it didn't matter, as it took a heavy toll. It is easy for someone to accuse or to lie. They can drop a dime, dial 911, spew forth lies, and then the cops that respond may have issues and chips on their shoulders, etc.

How many times have these accusations been correct? Zero.

Yet, it has cost me millions and a marriage. The costs are high for this imperfect system that never seeks to improve itself. As far as I am concerned, a system that injures the innocent in its endeavors to "catch the guilty" is worthless, and I wonder if we'd be better without it.

The media is asymetrical in how it covers stories -- spends a LOT of time on those actually guilty of their crimes, and almost no time at all on those that are innocent and falsely convicted.

Indeed, it can be a challenge to get them to cover such stories, and I was successful only once in doing so.

Innocent people have rights too -- like the right not to be bothered, have their lives disrupted and destroyed by all this maliciousness. But I guess no one cares for the innocent in this country -- the US.

If you are killing Jack to "save" Jill, you have a net effectiveness of zero. You are merely shifting misery from one place to another. You are not preventing misery. If anything, you are creating more of the same.

Gotta love the great ole' U.S. of A.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Count Fenring]

Again, I think we agree that the primary purpose of the law should be to protect the innocent, and that abuses of the law are common. That doesn't change the fact that, under current law, giving up that password is covered under lawful search and seizure. Furthermore, I think it's worth pointing out that, unless there is evidence proving your guilt on that encrypted drive, the search can't hurt you.

I want to be very clear here: I am not saying "If you're so innocent, what are you hiding?!" I'm saying that this whole conversation takes place in a supposition of guilt; we are talking about what a criminal, specifically a kiddy-porn aficionado, might do to prevent access to an encrypted volume that is known to be his and has a warrant covering it. We are talking, then, about whether these actions are legal.

Outside of that; personal experiences aside, it's naive to put forth that no agency can ever be allowed to search and seize property as part of an investigation. Just doesn't work. I'd like to hear an alternate plan, that doesn't involve a complete absence of any law enforcement. Because if you look at places where the government has broken down, and law enforcement doesn't function, you will find them uniformly worse than here. As a historical example, look at crime in the eighteenth century in England, prior to the formation of the Bow Street Runners.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

If the officials went through the proper channels and got a warrant from a judge, and if there was actually "sufficient cause", then that's one thing.

Of course, "sufficient cause" is and of itself a nebulous idea. And I simply don't trust law enforcement nor judges. I have seen far, far too many abuses in the past, and many judges simply "rubberstamp" rather than insist on standards.

Nor do I buy the notion that "other systems are worse" -- sounds more like fatalism than anything else. Besides, I don't care about what goes on in other countries, which, BTW, is heavily influenced by the culture and belief patters of the prevailing inhabitants.

Sadly, this is really a "memetic engineering" issue hiding under the guise of "justice" and "morality".

I will strongly assert, though, that mere possession of a sequence of bits on your hard drive should not be sufficient evidence to put you behind bars. There must be direct evidence that the person directly participated in the abuse of a child, or directly paid for those sequence of bits from the abuser or some "syndicate" or "cartel" involved with illegal exploitation of children. This will place the onus of the law and enforcement efforts where they actually belong -- in directly protecting children, and not in doing a moralistic song and dance claiming it's protecting children when it clearly does not.

As far as the "nothing to hide" argument goes, we all have something to "hide" -- that is, in fact, what privacy is all about. It doesn't mean what you are doing is necessarily "illegal"; it With the less than perfect justice system we have, you should all the more insist on privacy lest some innocent, consensual thing you might be doing in private should fall prey to the political whims and sways of the day.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Anonymous Coward]

judging by the fact that it found matches, I'd say it works fine.

Just because its easily defeatable doesn't mean it isnt worth doing as a layer to pick up those that might have not defeated it.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Count Fenring]

I will strongly assert, though, that mere possession of a sequence of bits on your hard drive should not be sufficient evidence to put you behind bars. There must be direct evidence that the person directly participated in the abuse of a child, or directly paid for those sequence of bits from the abuser or some "syndicate" or "cartel" involved with illegal exploitation of children. This will place the onus of the law and enforcement efforts where they actually belong -- in directly protecting children, and not in doing a moralistic song and dance claiming it's protecting children when it clearly does not.

Well, I'm not sure that I agree with you on "If they got kiddy porn for free, it's not a problem" angle, but regardless of position on that, it's currently a felony to look at kiddy porn. So, thus, law enforcement belongs there. Also, going after the people consuming kiddy porn seems to me to be a highly viable way of getting leads back to the producers, paid or not.

As far as the "nothing to hide" argument goes, we all have something to "hide" -- that is, in fact, what privacy is all about. It doesn't mean what you are doing is necessarily "illegal"; it With the less than perfect justice system we have, you should all the more insist on privacy lest some innocent, consensual thing you might be doing in private should fall prey to the political whims and sways of the day.

Again, I'm not making the "nothing to hide" argument. Never have been. I'm saying that, once you've been caught and a warrant for search has been legally issued, you don't have a right to conceal evidence requested by the law. Privacy laws aren't actually even involved here; this is evidence gathering that's pursuant from a criminal investigation already in progress, for which due cause is already proven.

If we were discussing a case in which, say, police illegally wiretapping someone found evidence of child pr0n, maybe your arguments would be relevant. But they aren't in the context we're working in.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[flajann]

I will strongly assert, though, that mere possession of a sequence of bits on your hard drive should not be sufficient evidence to put you behind bars. There must be direct evidence that the person directly participated in the abuse of a child, or directly paid for those sequence of bits from the abuser or some "syndicate" or "cartel" involved with illegal exploitation of children. This will place the onus of the law and enforcement efforts where they actually belong -- in directly protecting children, and not in doing a moralistic song and dance claiming it's protecting children when it clearly does not.

Well, I'm not sure that I agree with you on "If they got kiddy porn for free, it's not a problem" angle, but regardless of position on that, it's currently a felony to look at kiddy porn. So, thus, law enforcement belongs there. Also, going after the people consuming kiddy porn seems to me to be a highly viable way of getting leads back to the producers, paid or not.

As far as the "nothing to hide" argument goes, we all have something to "hide" -- that is, in fact, what privacy is all about. It doesn't mean what you are doing is necessarily "illegal"; it With the less than perfect justice system we have, you should all the more insist on privacy lest some innocent, consensual thing you might be doing in private should fall prey to the political whims and sways of the day.

Again, I'm not making the "nothing to hide" argument. Never have been. I'm saying that, once you've been caught and a warrant for search has been legally issued, you don't have a right to conceal evidence requested by the law. Privacy laws aren't actually even involved here; this is evidence gathering that's pursuant from a criminal investigation already in progress, for which due cause is already proven.

If we were discussing a case in which, say, police illegally wiretapping someone found evidence of child pr0n, maybe your arguments would be relevant. But they aren't in the context we're working in.

Well, now, this comes down to an argument about whether one not divulging a passphrase is "pleading the 5th" or "hiding evidence." We do have a right not to incriminate ourselves, and I don't see how pleading the 5th on what one's passphrase is is any different on pleading the 5th on where the body is buried. One's motivation in both cases may be to "hide evidence", but there you have it. If you say one does not have a right to plead the 5th in one case, I don't see how one could possibly have the right to plead the 5th in the other.

Ultimately, this boils down to whether or not it would be more prudent to punish the innocent or let the guilty go free. In an imperfect system of "justice" we have these checks and balances, and we do away with them to our peril.

Just because something is a law does not automatically "justify" it, and one would have to make a pretty convincing argument on how, say, downloading kiddie p0rn from the Usenet or other sources for free enhances the activities of those who create it. There is no profit motive; there is not much of a way for the producers to know who is downloading it or to what degree. So convince me.

Of course, kiddie p0rn is itself a morally divisive issue, a legal quagmire, and a lot of other nasties. Is mere presence on one's hard drive a felony, or is actually *viewing* it the felony? If viewage is the felony, how does one go about proving the p0rn was actually viewed? There are intent issues at stake here, and it is not clear to me how one resolves them in any logical and fair manner that would not also involve snagging some innocent people along the way.

It is just as bad to falsely convict a person of child pornography as it is to actively engage in child pornography itself. If you can devise a means that would catch the guilty whilst not harming the innocent in anyway, I am all ears.

But if we want to stick to 19th century thinking, then that is what the laws give us today.

Re:Bad way to search for kiddie porn

[Count Fenring]

We do have a right not to incriminate ourselves, and I don't see how pleading the 5th on what one's passphrase is is any different on pleading the 5th on where the body is buried. One's motivation in both cases may be to "hide evidence", but there you have it. If you say one does not have a right to plead the 5th in one case, I don't see how one could possibly have the right to plead the 5th in the other.

Except that the 5th is, in fact, limited to testimonial evidence, and a passphrase is no more testimonial evidence than a safe combination. Just because you have to say it, doesn't make it testimony.

Just because something is a law does not automatically "justify" it, and one would have to make a pretty convincing argument on how, say, downloading kiddie p0rn from the Usenet or other sources for free enhances the activities of those who create it. There is no profit motive; there is not much of a way for the producers to know who is downloading it or to what degree. So convince me.

It doesn't "morally" justify it, but it does in fact justify it as legally correct. At this point, I'm not arguing about right and wrong, but about whether something is legal.

Secondly, well, there may not be direct, per-viewing harm, but anyone who is a consumer of child pornography is essentially concealing a source of child pornography, unless they are doing so openly. Even without a direct profit chain, they are still thus contributing to the sexual exploitation of children.

I'm not quoting it, but the "is it viewing, or just having it" question is simply answered, because it is a felony to possess child pornography. There was a recent case in Tampa, for instance, where a lawyer, holding onto a tape of an under-18 girl filmed for a girls-gone-wild type video, was arrested for having possession of child pornography. I know this partly because the guy owed my mom money (unrelated) ;-)

It is just as bad to falsely convict a person of child pornography as it is to actively engage in child pornography itself. If you can devise a means that would catch the guilty whilst not harming the innocent in anyway, I am all ears.

I'm not sure I buy this. It's as bad to mess up a conviction accidentally as to rape a child and film it? Only in a world where every single fault has equal weight.

And again; no legal system ever extant will ever manage a 100% accuracy rate. It's just not possible. The only way to never accidentally harm innocents is to not have any justice system or police. And that hurts everyone, far, far worse than even a fairly corrupt system of courts.

That isn't to say that we don't need sweeping reforms, or that we don't have large problems. We do, and we do. But this isn't one of those problems. Assuming (and we are, again, because it's outside the scope of the argument) that probable cause exists and is sound, there's no good reason that a court can't demand a passphrase on a drive that is known to belong to the suspect.

RE It's good to see

[phatvw]

Hash is ~$30/gram depending on quality. Seems like those folks in PA have been smoking something else if they thought they needed to calculate an emmm-dee-five.

Re:RE It's good to see

[pak9rabid]

Man, you're getting ripped off.

Re:RE It's good to see

[Frosty Piss]

Hash is ~$30/gram depending on quality.

If you can find it.

Re:RE It's good to see

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Man, you're getting ripped off.

Nope, you've just been smoking oregano for all these years.

Re:RE It's good to see

[Hatta]

Hash is very rare in the US. As such, it commands a premium, just for novelty.

But yeah, it's still a ripoff. I've had some nice hash from the netherlands, switzerland, and morocco , and I'd take some good kind bud over hash any day.

I dont see how the 4th amendment applies here

[Phizzle]

The guy whose computer was searched, abandoned the computer and gave up any rights at that point, the person who found the porn was computers new owner. Just like any trash tossed out becomes public domain, there should have been zero expectation of privacy at that point. I am not a legal scholar, but I do not see how the 4th amendment applies here. It would be no different than if this was a diary in a different language and the person who inherited the diary found a translator, upon finding criminal evidence it would be fully admissible.

Re:I dont see how the 4th amendment applies here

[jgtg32a]

That's the first thing I thought as well.

Re:I dont see how the 4th amendment applies here

[SeeSp0tRun]

I forget the name of the case specifically, but here is the gist of it...
A phone booth is a public place. A bookie is running his business out of said phone booth, and the feds realize what is going on. They do a warrantless tap on the phone during the hours the bookie is known to hold business phone calls. They take all the recorded phone calls to court, and everything gets thrown out... Why?

You are given the reasonable expectation of privacy even in a phone booth. The same is said for the trunk (but not the cab) of a vehicle. The fact that this computer was not given by the owner to the authorities makes any search null and void. While the landlord has the right to charge the renter, he has no right to destroy or sell property within the rented property, as it simply is not his. This makes any "ownership" transaction between any parties but the true owner null and void. Had he gotten a court order to remove the belongings, it would be a different story. So lets blame the first party to fault, not the misinformed ones. Not that I think it is a free pass on kiddie porn... but it is the fair law.

Re:I dont see how the 4th amendment applies here

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy whose computer was searched, abandoned the computer and gave up any rights at that point, the person who found the porn was computers new owner. Just like any trash tossed out becomes public domain, there should have been zero expectation of privacy at that point. I am not a legal scholar, but I do not see how the 4th amendment applies here. It would be no different than if this was a diary in a different language and the person who inherited the diary found a translator, upon finding criminal evidence it would be fully admissible.

So you don't see the problem with, say, you to sell a computer on eBay, me to buy it, load it up with kiddie porn, then turn you in for clearly being the one who downloaded said porn (since i got the computer from you and all), and have that stand in court???

Wow...

Re:I dont see how the 4th amendment applies here

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not a legal scholar

Well, no fucking shit, Jack. I think we all got that far without any help.

And really, encrypt your porn, guys!

[Anonymous Coward]

You never can tell if something you download off of the Internet is "child porn" or not, so you should always encrypt.

Moreover, you should probably run ImageMagik on all your files anyway (assuming they are images) to confound any md5 checking. For video, you can transcode it to the same effect.

Don't be stupid. I am NOT advocating "child porn", but knowing whether a model is 17 or 18 is not something I would want to risk going to jail over.

Re:And really, encrypt your porn, guys!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably too hard for the authorities to "prove" that a model was 17 or 18 also. Especially considering she'll probably be 18 by the time any real distribution occurs, which means they'll have to prove the film was made x months ago, at which time she wasn't 18, blah blah.

They generally go after the guys trading the 13 y/o girls crowd, where anybody in their right mind can tell she's not anywhere near 18.

Re:And really, encrypt your porn, guys!

[avandesande]

It's no different than doing a keyword search on a directory of text files.

Re:And really, encrypt your porn, guys!

[Artifakt]

The problem with that word "generally" is when you contribute to the guy who just loses a bitterly fought political race, running against the incumbent sheriff .

good point

[Reality Master 201]

Anyone who's not talking out their ass care to comment on this?

Re:good point

[LWATCDR]

The problem I have here is I would think that this would come under reasonable cause.
Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.

Re:good point

[Phizzle]

Finding child porn on an abandoned computer constitutes ample cause, and considering the computer was abandoned removes any constraints from investigators as to the tools they choose. Seems cut and dry... Now I got to read more on this case - maybe there is more to it not apparent from the immediately linked article.

Re:good point

[LWATCDR]

Not really.
We can at best hope that they don't toss out all of it because it was a legal search after all.

Re:good point

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.

And would be sufficient to get a warrant to verify it was actually the case.

Re:good point

[Locklin]

Seems cut and dry to me too. *If* they had asked for a warrant, they surely would have gotten it.

Re:good point

[Anonymous Coward]

LWATCDR:

The problem I have here is I would think that this would come under reasonable cause.
Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.

What if I broke into your house (not a legal eviction = break in, legal evixction have to store your stuff, not "give it to friends"), found your computer and "gave" it to a "friend". Maybe that "friend" downloaded the porn, got caught by mom (or dad) looking at gay kiddie porn and blamed it on the computer. Yeah, the other guy must have downloaded it. Let's call the cops, on him!

Are you going to worry about your security deposit or getting your stuff back, or are you going to worry about a BS charge?

Oh, and personally, I think the private use of porn doesn't promote it. Possession is not the same as production - which is bad. Paying for it, which creates the demand for production, is bad.

But once it's made, trading it for free doesn't re-hurt the kid... Actually, that might not be true, a kid who wasn't dead might be embarrassed by the images being passed around, so I'll back off that assertion.

Possession = unethical but it shouldn't be illegal. It's unethical for cops to say where did you get this from before announcing that, despite possession, there was no evidence of production

Distribution, should be prosecutable, but with the primary intent of getting the producer.

Producing child porn, as in porn of actual children, should be big time illegal.

Producing fake porn (evidence is a renderfarm, not a multiple dvd angle camera setup) should NOT be a crime. Seriousness partially aside, there's no rape charge, South Park aside, for Indy's last movie, much less the Jar Jar rape of Star Wars.

Pretending one form is another is a dodge which must be checked for, but the above should be the framework we work towards.

Re:good point

[MasterOfMagic]

Chain of custody. Very important in forensics.

The landlord and his friend might have had a motive to lie about the guy that was behind on his rent payments. From the blurb from the article, it doesn't seem that his landlord had completed the eviction procedure yet, and was anxious to get Crist out of his house and a new tenant in. The eviction process is not immediate. So he gives Crist's computer to his friend, his friend backdates the clock, and his friend puts kiddie porn on there and turns it over to the cops.

The fact is that the police cannot be certain of the chain of custody in this case without a warrant. With a warrant, they take affidavits in support of chain of custody before they go poking around. It's clear and documented using established procedure. The landlord and his friend can still lie, but they're now subject to the penalties for filing a false statement. Without that supporting documentation and especially because of the nature of the case and the possible motives of the landlord and his friends, it makes the chain of custody issue important.

Re:good point

[Artifakt]

But the DA didn't try to argue that (at least as the article explains it). Maybe he should have, but apparently he instead argued that scanning the drive for files wasn't a search if you calculated MD5s for them and compared them to a table instead of actually trying to open the files.
I can see why the DA did it that way. Arguing that the machine wasn't the suspect's anymore might have given law enforcement probable cause, but then DA would have to prosecute against a defense lawyer who could argue about the chain of evidence. When did the suspect let go of the computer, and how many other people could have had their hands on it before the one who came forward as a witness? Did the police have an unbroken chain of evidence between when the PC left the suspect's custody and the search? Maybe the DA was hoping to avoid that, so he raised the argument that this wasn't even a search at all, and this is what happened instead.

Re:good point

[MasterOfMagic]

According to the article, the computer was removed from the defendant's residence by his landlord's friend because the landlord was in the process of evicting the defendant for non-payment of rent. This computer was not found abandoned on the side of the road with the trash. There's no clear indicator that the defendant gave the computer to the landlord's friend, which means the computer is the defendant's property. Therefore, the landlord's friend does not have the right to consent to a search of the computer. This means that the police need a warrant to search that computer, and given the evidence that the landlord's friend had, they would have likely gotten a warrant without any issue.

It's a procedural screwup on the part of the police. It happens. They're human.

Re:good point

[Just Some Guy]

Sell comes a cross Crist's computer, and he hands over the computer to his friend Hipple who he knows is looking for a computer.

So, Crist's old laptop came to have child porn on it some time when it was possessed by Crist, Sell, or Hipple. Has anyone thought to question Sell?

While I have no sympathy whatsoever for child abusers of any stripe, I'm a lot more interested in the rule of law being preserved than I am in discarding the rules to catch one man.

Re:good point

[LWATCDR]

"What if I broke into your house (not a legal eviction = break in, legal evixction have to store your stuff, not "give it to friends"), found your computer and "gave" it to a "friend"."
If they did that and called the cops it is in fact legal to use in court. It would be up to the defense to claim that it was in fact tainted.
"Oh, and personally, I think the private use of porn doesn't promote it. "
Doesn't matter because you don't make up the laws. I think selling a product that you know is harmful should be illegal. But every convenience store, WalMart, and grocery store I know of sells cigarettes and it is legal. What we feel should and should not be legal really doesn't matter. And is totally irrelevant in this case.
If the computer was stolen then then that is a separate crime.
To me it sounds a lot more like it was abandoned.

Re:good point

[guruevi]

But who says that the kiddie porn got there from a specific person. Maybe it's from a previous owner, maybe a botnet, maybe the same person that calls the police put it on there in order to frame the first person. Either way you take this, the chain of evidence was broken by police not doing their job right.

Re:good point

[fscking_coward_2001]

The computer wasn't abandoned. A quick read of the court's decision will explain the reasoning.

Re:good point

[Chris Burke]

The problem I have here is I would think that this would come under reasonable cause.
Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.

It seems that way to me as well, and had they tried to get a warrant based on probable cause, it probably would have succeeded.

Conducting the search without a warrant, however, isn't going to fly unless their are also "exigent circumstances". Which in this case would mean the police have reason to believe that any potential evidence on the laptop would vanish before they could acquire a warrant. Since the laptop was in the possession of the 3rd party who called the police to report the crime, that seems unlikely.

So not getting the warrant was a big mistake, and it's likely a criminal will walk as a result. Even though it's sad, this has to happen. Failing to get a conviction and having the perp walk free is the only thing that motivates police to follow all the correct procedures and guarantee all the suspect's rights. Now the police know that a warrant is not optional when searching a laptop. So in the future the cops won't make this mistake, perps will be caught using proper rules of evidence, and our rights will be more secure.

Re:good point

[meringuoid]

Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.

I don't get why anyone would ever do this. They trust the police so much? They're so certain they'll not become suspects themselves? Personally I'd break out DBAN on the spot and never breathe a word of it to anybody.

Re:good point

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be up to the defense to claim that it was in fact tainted.

Whose defense? You should mean the defense of whoever took the computer since the original owner wouldn't have any defense because there wouldn't be any case against him in the first place because the computer has been in somebody else's possession by the time the cops get it.

Re:good point

[kabocox]

FTA "First, the facts. Crist is behind on his rent payments, and his landlord starts to evict him by hiring Sell to remove Crist's belongings and throw them away. Sell comes a cross Crist's computer, and he hands over the computer to his friend Hipple who he knows is looking for a computer. Hipple starts to look through the files, and he comes across child pornography: Hipple freaks out and calls the police. The police then conduct a warrantless forensic examination of the computer" So yea, I agree that the question here is whether they had a right to search it or not. Seems like the DA realized that they didn't, and tried to bypass the 4th with the "hash" theory, which the court rightly smacked down.

Um, sounds like the police and Hipple never had rights to look at it to begin with. "legally" Now the police will look at anything that you bring up to them and ask them to. If you are a business owner, and say you think that an employee is doing "something" on their machine please look. Well, the employee has no exceptions of privacy. The employee doesn't legally own the computer in that example and whoever does can ask the cops to do/scan anything that they want. The cops don't need a warrant in that case.

Now Hipple just bringing a computer up to the cops. Well, the cops would assume that Hipple legally owns the damn thing and they don't then need warrant in that case to scan/search it. Now if Hipple has physical possession, but didn't legally buy it that's a whole another can of worms. The police are basically in the clear for what they did, but I'm fairly certain that they are legally SOL on any evidence obtained that way.

I'm iffy on if the cops even should have the right to image a HD without a warrant.

Re:good point

[MozeeToby]

seems to be reasonable cause to me.

Then the police should do their job and get a search warrant.

Re:good point

[DavidTC]

It is, indeed, probable cause, and enough to get a warrant.

Of course, then the police have to actually go before a judge and get the warrant.

Re:good point

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly the point. There was "probable" cause to search the computer, and such a search would have been reasonable, had the police gotten a warrant.

Re:good point

[scot4875]

Seems cut and dried to me too, except for that whole "chain of custody" thing, and the fact that the landlord is trying to evict the guy, and planting child porn on someone's computer really wouldn't be very difficult once said computer is in their possession.

Chances are, the original owner was, in fact, the one who downloaded it, but we'll never know -- especially now that the authorities have botched the case by trying to subvert the guy's rights.

--Jeremy

Re:good point

[LWATCDR]

Yes actually they do. I don't fear the police. To be honest just about every time I have had to deal with them they did their jobs well. Be it tickets, a break in, a drunk sibling that got into a fight, or when a crazy friend got taken in for violating a restraining order.
I have a good friend that is on the local force and a brother in law that is also a cop.
So I have never seen any reason to worry about dealing with them.

Re:good point

[LWATCDR]

The police have the right to search without a warrant if they have enough cause.
In this case I would say that they had enough cause.

Re:good point

[LatencyKills]

Beyond what they found, wouldn't there be a chain of custody issue? The landlord could have put the files on the computer. Sell could have put the files on the computer. Heck, Hipple could have put the files on the computer if he had a grudge of some sort against Crist. Like I dropped a jump drive in a taxi and three days later was arrested for what they found on it.

Re:good point

[greyhueofdoubt]

Without apparent imminent danger to life or property, the DA still has a responsibility to obtain a warrant. You are confusing probably cause to get a warrant (you found dirty pictures) and probable cause to break down a door (you hear screaming).

-b

Re:good point

[JBHarris]

Due process still needs to apply. Since Hippie may have been hired by Sell to PUT kiddie porn on that machine as a means to blackmail Crist for the rent. A judge would have asked this question.

Re:good point

[Lordpidey]

No, this is not the case, atleast not in the USA.

Without a warrant officers are limited to

1.) A patdown search for weapons if they feel threatened.
2.) A detailed search of a PERSON when that person enters custody.
3.) A search of the "wingspan" of a person when they enter custody.
4.) A cursory search of the premises in which someone was arrested if they have reason to believe an accomplice is hiding.
5.) When the owner consents to the search.

Re:good point

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the Judge's opinion (pg. 3), the investigating detective was aware that the computer had been reported stolen when he contacted the state Attorney General's Office to arrange a forensic examination. So they had no reasonable basis to conclude that the computer's owner had given consent.

Furthermore, the opinion explicitly states that the landlord had not evicted Crist. Instead,

[a]fter she visited his residence and heard no barking dog, as was usually the case, she determined to have Crist's belongings removed. She did not notify him of this fact, and Crist was not otherwise placed on notice that his previously exclusive occupancy over the leased premises had ended.

Eviction isn't something that automatically happens. A landlord has to take certain steps to exercise that right, such as informing the tenant. Furthermore, the Judge notes an earlier Third Circuit opinion (which I think is binding in this case) that says

[a]bandonment for purposes of the Fourth Amendment differs from abandonment in property law; here the analysis examines the individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, not his property interest in the item.

Since Crist hadn't been notified of the eviction and did promptly reported the computer stolen, it's obvious that he didn't intend to abandon the computer.

If you want to make more than a superficial legal arguments about the case, I suggest that you read the Judge's opinion and the law review article linked to at the end of TFA's into paragraph, which explains why, in some cases, running hashes should be considered a search. (Although I admit that, not being a lawyer or law student, I mostly assume that these sources aren't quote-mining, misreading precedent, or selectively omitting relevant precedent. That's one of the reasons that "law-talking guys" are better equipped to comment on the details of a case.)

Re:good point

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so someone breaks into your house and steals your computer, then you have abandoned it?

Not to mention that several people had pssesion of the computer, and anyone could have put the files on there.

Moron.

Re:good point

[Anonymous Coward]

"What if I broke into your house (not a legal eviction = break in, legal eviction have to store your stuff, not "give it to friends"), found your computer and "gave" it to a "friend"."
If they did that and called the cops it is in fact legal to use in court. It would be up to the defense to claim that it was in fact tainted.
If the computer was stolen then then that is a separate crime.
To me it sounds a lot more like it was abandoned.

Original AC here. Other AC's... be more polite, otherwise there's no reason to respond to ACs at all.

To respond, the landlord broke the law when taking the tenant's stuff. It doesn't matter if he used a proxy to do so.

There is no way to show that the laptop got that content during the tenants ownership. Date stamps can be forged. Once the laptop left the tenant's possession, anyone could have put kiddie porn on it.

What better way to evict someone illegally than to get the cops to arrest them as a pedophile? The tenant is in jail and unable to effectively mount a legal defense against a fraudulent eviction. The friend of a friend argument used to "find" the "evidence" insulates the landlord from counter claims after the fact, even if the tenant were able to defend themselves against a bogus kiddie porn charge.

If you were single, not an easy defense. If married, your kids might be seized from your wife if she tries to defend you "She's in on it!"

The reason this should should be suppressed as evidence, quite frankly, is that it encourages bullshit charges on innocent people. Following the existing laws to get a warrant (or evict the guy legally in the first place) would have gotten an actual guilty person found guilty without endangering the rights of the innocent.

Re:good point

[ivan256]

I'll teach these guys to skip rent payments! Hey Hipple! Plant some of that kiddie porn you've been making on this guy's computer and call the cops. We'll make an example out of this deadbeat!

Not saying that's what really happened, but we do have the bill of rights for a reason...

search = search

[drfireman]

Calculating hash values isn't search. Calculating them and comparing them to a database is. Not only is it quite clearly search (searching for files that match known MD5 signatures), it's hard to imagine another way to describe it without being deliberately obfuscatory.

Re:search = search

[characterZer0]

To calculate the hash values they had to read the contents of the drive. That is a search of a person's effects without a warrant.

Re:search = search

[pilgrim23]

Question from a non-tech: Is a hash values somewhat of a signature value? That is, would it be possible for a jpg of "Little Suzie does the Walrus" possibly have the same hash value as "Aunt Gertude writes us about her knitting"?

Re:search = search

[frieko]

Here's a hash algorithm: Go into a room and write down everything you see. The list is now a hash of the room. It doesn't matter if you compare the list to a database of illegal things or not. A hash is a search.

Re:search = search

[Anonymous Coward]

Is a hash values somewhat of a signature value?

Yes.

That is, would it be possible for a jpg of "Little Suzie does the Walrus" possibly have the same hash value as "Aunt Gertude writes us about her knitting"?

Technically possible because there are a limited number of possible hashes (2^128), but so unlikely that you can consider it to be impossible. Here's a website that sort of describes it: http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/law.html

Re:search = search

[hummassa]

Question from a non-tech: Is a hash values somewhat of a signature value?

Yes

That is, would it be possible for a jpg of "Little Suzie does the Walrus" possibly have the same hash value as "Aunt Gertude writes us about her knitting"?

Yes it is possible, but... it is extremely unlikely that it will happen (because of the intrinsic properties of MD5 hashes, etc...)

Re:search = search

[Tony Hoyle]

Theoretically, yes. In practice, unlikely to happen. You'd still need to verify the suspect images some other way though.

Re:search = search

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Computers are magic. Stuff on them doesn't count as regular effects.

Re:search = search

[drfireman]

To calculate the hash values they had to read the contents of the drive. That is a search of a person's effects without a warrant.

That may or may not pass legal muster, but in lay terms it's just silly. If the hash is used to find something (or fail to find it), it's a search. If it's not, it's not a search. In this case, it was clearly a search, but not simply because some data were hashed.

Re:search = search

[Obfuscant]

The difference is that your "list of items in the room" gives you information about the specific items in the room. An MD5 hash tells you nothing about the contents of the room.

Here's an MD5 of a file I happen to have: 401b30e3b8b5d629635a5c613cdb7919.

1. How big is the file?
2. Does it contain the letter 'y'?
3. Does it contain the word "bomb"?

Here's a list of a room: 1) lamp. 2) table. 3) Book with title "how to blow up anything at any time". 4) 1/4 pound of C4.

1. Does the room have a table?
2. Does the room contain explosives?

A true hash is one-way. You can't answer the questions I asked about a room from a hash; you can from a list. You also don't get different "hashes" by just writing the list of items in the room down in a different order, you do get a different list order.

Re:search = search

[Dhalka226]

In lay terms, the police hashing every file on a person's hard drive won't occur if they're not searching for something. I highly doubt they do it for funsies.

However, I still agree with the grandparent post. If you have to comb through my FAT or journal or whatever to find files, then read every single bit of every single file into an algorithm, you're doing a search. The fact that you're inside my computer/hard drive at all means you're doing a search. I don't care if you ultimately decide you need the evidence by running it through your database any more than I would care if you thumbed around in my room but ultimately decided not to use what you found. What you do with the information may ultimately determine what effect it has on the case, but it doesn't change the fact that you conducted a search and that it was illegal.

I know the real-life analogies tend to suck, but compare this to a cop dropping a drug-sniffing dog in through your window. The dog searches everything, but he doesn't really know what it is he's looking at. All he knows is if he finds something he's been trained to look for. I don't think most people would have any trouble calling this a search the minute they entered your premises. They definitely wouldn't have trouble calling it a search when the dog starts sniffing around. The only difference I can see between what happened in the story and the analogy is that you can separate the "sniffing around" from the comparison in the story, whereas in the dog's head it's essentially instantaneous.

Essentially, I think you're making a worthless distinction between a computerized methodology and a human one. The fact that a computer can hypothetically stop between the sniffing through all of your data and the seeing what it found steps doesn't mean it should be treated any differently even if it does. And as I said before, it's all relatively moot since the police aren't going to go through the time and expense of the former only to stop before the latter.

Re:search = search

[Chris Burke]

No, in lay terms, "looking at" is searching, and "reading" is searching. If the police come into your house and go through your file cabinet looking at your tax returns, that's a "search" whether or not they want to find anything specific. To hash your disk they have to read the disk, ergo they "searched" it.

Restricting "search" to only apply specifically to the act of trying to find a particular piece of information is a pedantic engineering definition, not a lay-person's. Nor a legal one, for that matter. Neither lay nor legal person would agree that having the police look through and itemize your possessions doesn't count as a search so long as they are not looking for anything in particular, especially not wrt the 4th Amendment.

Re:search = search

[drfireman]

In lay terms, the police hashing every file on a person's hard drive won't occur if they're not searching for something. I highly doubt they do it for funsies. ...
Essentially, I think you're making a worthless distinction between a computerized methodology and a human one.

First of all, you're assuming that the sole conceivable purpose of hashing files is to facilitate searching. That's just not true. Hashing is also useful for, for example, detecting corruption (or tampering). I'm not a lawyer, but perhaps having verified hashes of the entire drive and of each file would be useful for some legal purpose. Even if it isn't, even if searching is the only conceivable use for hash results on a hard drive's files, that doesn't mean hashing = searching. Similarly, if you buy a gun for the purpose of killing your neighbor, and then think the better of it, you're not guilty of murder.

My only point being that the Slashdot headline was silly. It's a search if it's a search (not speaking legally of course, lawyers have their own ideas). If someone hashes your hard drive just in case, then thinks the better of it and discards the hashes, it's not a search in any meaningful sense. They never initiated a process by which anything could be found. It's not at all like a police dog, because the two parts -- the hash and the use of the hashes for search -- are quite easily separated. Hashing is only the first part. If you have a police dog that can be dropped into a room and asked later to bark (under oath) if he smelled drugs, then I'd make the same argument for dogs. Although it's a little different, because the dog already knows if the smell is in his database.

Re:search = search

[frieko]

Here's a list of a room: 1) lamp. 2) table. 3) Book with title "how to blow up anything at any time". 4) 1/4 pound of C4.

1. How big is the room?
2. What color is the table?
3. Is the person who lives there a terrorist, or a licensed demolition contractor?

The list hash is ALSO one way. You can't reconstruct the room from the list, you can only create a room that hashes to the list given a large amount of time. And you STILL have to compare it to the database of illegal things, even if you do so mentally.

Re:search = search

[Obfuscant]

How big is the room?

A list doesn't tell you everything about the items on the list, but it does tell you SOME things about the items. This is MUCH DIFFERENT than a hash, which tells you NOTHING about the contents of the file it is computed from.

Can you tell me ANYTHING about the file from the hash I posted? No. You can't even tell me it was a file, or where it was. You know "file" because I told you. It could have been the serial input from my mouse port for thirty seconds.

But this is a red herring. It is not just the hash that is the issue, but making a LIST of the hashes and comparing them to another list of known hashes of known files. THAT makes it different.

Re:search = search

[frieko]

Okay, let say the cops go into your house, take a picture of the room, do an MD5 of the picture. Tells them nothing about the room. It was still a search! You don't have to compare the hashes to anything, the process of compiling hashes is a search.

Maybe the part you're stumbling on is the cops don't have to collect any useful information at all for it to be an illegal search. Otherwise they could break in to your house whenever they felt like just to be dicks, or to intimidate, even if they didn't actually look around.

Re:search = search

[drfireman]

Obviously you didn't read my previous messages in which I pointed out that a searching process is one by which something could conceivably be found. So be it.

Your analysis is ridiculous and obviously incorrect. A process by which nothing can be found is not searching in any meaningful sense whatsoever. The police coming into your house of course can never meet this definition because no human being can force themselves not to see things that they look at. A computer hashing your files can.

Even a careless and superficial reading of my earlier post could not possibly lead to the interpretation that I think searching means trying to find a particular piece of information. If you truly believe that "looking at" and "searching" are equivalent in lay terms, then you simply don't know the meaning of one of those three terms.

Re:search = search

[drfireman]

Got a little lost in my previous reply, and forgot to reiterate the point I was making. Obviously the analogy to police searches is just silly. But just to be a little more explicit about what I'm claiming hashing is not equivalent to searching.

Hashing can be used for many purposes. Some of them would only be described as searching if you're trying to confuse people. Hashing isn't searching, and it doesn't inevitably entail searching. If someone hashes something, even if you can't think of any other conceivable use for the information, it's not searching unless actual searching is done. Just like if I run chasing after someone with a baseball bat, and there's no conceivable other purpose for it than hitting them with it. I'm pretty sure that unless someone actually gets hit with the bat, I'm not guilty of whacking (in the legal sense). I may be guilty of other things in that case.

As a practical matter, it's quite easy to imagine this coming up if someone accidentally hashes a whole disk in the process of some kind of analysis, even though they don't mean to search for anything.

Re:search = search

[Chris Burke]

Obviously you didn't read my previous messages in which I pointed out that a searching process is one by which something could conceivably be found. So be it.

Of course I read it, and I'm saying that is a pedantic engineering definition of the term that is not used anywhere outside of your slashdot posting.

Your analysis is ridiculous and obviously incorrect. A process by which nothing can be found is not searching in any meaningful sense whatsoever. The police coming into your house of course can never meet this definition because no human being can force themselves not to see things that they look at. A computer hashing your files can.

A policeman coming into your house can promise not to use anything they see against you. That's no better than their promise not to use computer hashes to evaluate the contents of your computer. Oh sure you are correct that in any case the information exists within the brains of the police, so they "know" something even if they keep their promise. Which is my point -- yours is an overly technical, absolutist definition that doesn't resolve the real issues at stake.

Even a careless and superficial reading of my earlier post could not possibly lead to the interpretation that I think searching means trying to find a particular piece of information. If you truly believe that "looking at" and "searching" are equivalent in lay terms, then you simply don't know the meaning of one of those three terms.

The only difference is the word "particular", which I'm sure makes a huge difference if you use the most narrow definition not that this was the intent. An instance of information is a particular piece of information, not necessarily one decided in advance to be found.

"The police looking at your personal effects" and "the police searching your personal effects" are the same to a lay person. That is of course the context in which we're discussing these terms, the context of your 4th Amendment rights, is it not? This is exactly what I expect from a Slashdot pedant -- limiting words to only the most narrow of several definitions, chosen not by the intent of their usage but by how well they serve the pedant, while ignoring the context in which they are used. It is truly the most useless form of reasoning I've ever seen.

Anyway, long story short, the court disagrees with you. Bring your pedantic argument to them, and perhaps they'll realize they've been misusing the word "search"! I'm sure some dictionary.com links, perhaps highlighting exactly what definition you've chosen as the "right" one, would help them see the light.

Re:search = search

[Chris Burke]

As a practical matter, it's quite easy to imagine this coming up if someone accidentally hashes a whole disk in the process of some kind of analysis, even though they don't mean to search for anything.

Exactly what kind of analysis is this that doesn't actually provide any specific information, in which the analyzer is not looking for any particular information, and which if performed by a police officer would not be considered a "search" with regards to the 4th Amendment? The only distinction between "analysis" and "search" of a disk would be algorithmic -- as in you're limiting "search" to mean only those items of information acquired by some form of item-by-item comparison between a prescribed value and data on the disk selected through various means. Yes, that is the correct comp-sci definition. It is not a relevant legal or lay-person definition. It is a useless distinction for these purposes.

Re:search = search

[drfireman]

Of course I read it, and I'm saying that is a pedantic engineering definition of the term that is not used anywhere outside of your slashdot posting.

Okay, well I acknowledge that you may have read my original post, but
your comment on how I "restricted" the definition of the word "search"
seems like at best a willful misconstrual. I don't know anything
about engineering or computer science, and if it's a meaning used only
in my posting, then obviously it's not an engineering definition. But
I don't really care if what seems to me a patently obvious distinction
turns out to be an engineering concept as well. If you're really
claiming that defining "search" as a process by which something could
be found (or not found) is a pedantic definition that has meaning only
in engineering, then I'm willing to leave it at that.

Your example of the policeman again demonstrates my point (and the
fact that you didn't understand it) perfectly. That process results
in finding stuff. Therefore it's a search process. Hashing a hard
drive may or may not, depending on what the hash is used for. If the
hash is carried out as part of some kind of disk verification process,
backup process, or some other process that doesn't tell you anything
about the nature or contents of the files on the disk, then I fail to
see how it meets the commonsense definition of search. In the case of
the original article here, it was clearly used for searching, so it's
a moot point. But that doesn't demonstrate that hashing=searching, as
the original article would lead you to believe. That only
demonstrates that searching=searching.

The only difference is the word "particular", which I'm sure makes a huge difference if you use the most narrow definition not that this was the intent. An instance of information is a particular piece of information, not necessarily one decided in advance to be found.

Get rid of the word particular, my point still holds. If nothing can
be found by the process, it's not search.

"The police looking at your personal effects" and "the police searching your personal effects" are the same to a lay person. That is of course the context in which we're discussing these terms, the context of your 4th Amendment rights, is it not? This is exactly what I expect from a Slashdot pedant -- limiting words to only the most narrow of several definitions, chosen not by the intent of their usage but by how well they serve the pedant, while ignoring the context in which they are used. It is truly the most useless form of reasoning I've ever seen.

Let me turn this around. I'm limiting the use of the word to its
actual meaning. You are trying to expand it to encompass things it
does not mean, just because they happen to coincide in the single case
at hand. You've broadened the meaning of the word "search" to
meaninglessness, just because of the fact that it often implies search
in the context that's meaningful to you right this moment.

Anyway, long story short, the court disagrees with you. Bring your pedantic argument to them, and perhaps they'll realize they've been misusing the word "search"! I'm sure some dictionary.com links, perhaps highlighting exactly what definition you've chosen as the "right" one, would help them see the light.

As I'm sure you know from having read my previous postings, I was not
trying to provide a legal definition of "search." The fact that the
legal definition does not agree with mine is unrelated to anything
I've written on the subject, but I guess it made a good lead-in for
your gag about dictionary.com. However, since you've made this claim
and called me a pedant, I may as well press the issue. Could you
please provide a link to a court case in which hashing used for a
purpose that doesn't involve finding anything was found to constitute
search?

Re:search = search

[drfireman]

Exactly what kind of analysis is this that doesn't actually provide any specific information, in which the analyzer is not looking for any particular information, and which if performed by a police officer would not be considered a "search" with regards to the 4th Amendment? The only distinction between "analysis" and "search" of a disk would be algorithmic -- as in you're limiting "search" to mean only those items of information acquired by some form of item-by-item comparison between a prescribed value and data on the disk selected through various means. Yes, that is the correct comp-sci definition. It is not a relevant legal or lay-person definition. It is a useless distinction for these purposes.

Hashes have lots of uses, most of which I probably don't even know about. I would imagine it would be a useful police procedure to calculate hashes on a hard drive confiscated as evidence to help rule out the possibility of tampering. I would also imagine that backup software might calculate hashes. Neither of these processes is well described as search, except probably in legal terms. Those are just the two I could think of, I'm sure someone who knows something about computer science could come up with many more. Incidentally, this is the second time in this thread you've accused me of using some term in a technical sense only applicable in computer science or engineering. Since I don't have any education in either area, this seems pretty unlikely. In any case, if it turns out I am, it's not because I have some pedantic attachment to correct technical definitions of which I'm unaware.

MD5 Collisions...

[languagehacker]

...are like a mistaken identity sitcom waiting to happen--especially when that mistaken identity is a pedophile. I mean, they've covered that in probably like four Seinfelds, three Curb Your Enthusiasms, and a couple of Arrested Developments, right?

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Trevin]

Even if the hard drive has a couple of million files on it and there are a few thousand known hashes of illegal files, the odds of having a different file with a matching hash are in the neighborhood of 10^28 to 1 against.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

And hell, beyond that... this was pretty clearly only meant as a first pass search, were it to go to trial (especially on the basis of a single collision - we'll have to agree the odds of two separate collisions are too small to consider) the relevant file would certainly be shown. And then either it's kiddy porn or it isn't.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Locklin]

And if there is a Collisions, I'm quite sure someone would actually *look* at the file in question before locking you up in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Kokuyo]

Considering the news a few weeks back that some of the FBI's DNA entries matched several offenders or some such thing you really shouldn't make a comparison using DNA ;)

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[dhTardis]

Each character is a hex digit, not any alphanumeric, so it's 16^32=2^128 possibilities instead of 36^32. That's 186 billion times smaller, but it's still a lot.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

But... you CAN generate MD5 collisions with an algorithm...

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can create collisions with an algorithm: http://www.cryptography.com/cnews/hash.html

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Chapter80]

Well, first, your math is off. 2^128, not 36^32. Both huge numbers.

Second, say there are four-thousand known kiddie porn files of average size 50K. That's 200 Million bits of data total. Any one of those bits can be changed without any loss of it being kiddie porn. So there are your original 4000 md5 hashes, but an additional 200 Million hashes with one bit changed.

In fact, I bet any amount of bits up to 1K random bits could be changed in any one of these files without significant loss of fidelity, such that the average juror would consider it to be kiddie porn. So now we have (approximately) 1K! * (50K choose 1K) * 4K different hashes that map to what someone would visually consider to be kiddie porn.

Looking through your approximately 100K files on your PC, chances are near certainty* that at least ONE has the same hash as a file that would be visually considered to be kiddie porn.

Please report to jail.

*ok I didn't do the math, my calculator ran out of digits. But I just wanted to add in the "change a few random bits" logic.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[bioradmeister]

Unless of course you are using a MD5 implementation with a bug in it.

I have done this and had a lot of collisions! :) Who's to say the cops aren't using their own hand rolled MD5 sum maker that is broke.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Hatta]

Sure, if you're calculating the chance that one specific file will match one specific MD5 sum, the chances are astronomical. But if you're calculating the chance that any of the tens of thousands of files on your PC will match any of the millions of MD5 sums in their database, the chances of a collision are much much higher. This is the birthday paradox in action.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Tom]

Well, the thing is that you can generate collisions. I don't get all the math behind it (crypto is just a hobby, not my full-time job) but many academic cryptographers consider MD5 (and SHA1, btw) broken, and have done so for at least two years.

Now, that doesn't mean there's an implementation. It could still require something like 50 times the entire computing power of the globe. That's why I put "academic" explicitly in there. But as I said: I don't get all the math so I can't make a guess at what the ressources and requirements are. For most practical purposes it's probably still safe at least for the moment. But collisions are more than just fun anomalies at this point.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[GameMaster]

On the one hand, I'd like to agree with you. On the other hand, you are talking about police that were to lazy/stupid/incompetent to bother getting an, easily justified, search warrant before performing a search on private property. The problem is, there are plenty of cases where incompetent police/DAs continue to push a case against someone (and, consequently, destroy that person's life) long after it has become obvious to almost anyone that their evidence is garbage or the situation is absurd. I have to assume that this happens because someone is trying to avoid losing face. Some examples are that teacher that was tried because the school district didn't bother to keep their porn blocker license up-to-date and the kids saw some explicit pop-up ads; the, top of his class black, highschooler who was sentenced to 10 years in jail because he had consensual oral sex with a girl a year or two younger than himself at a party and didn't want to appease the ego of the DA by making a plea bargain that branded him as a sexual predator for the rest of his life; and of course the college Lacrosse team that was tried by a DA even though it became clear almost immediately that the evidence and testimony against them was trash.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that there are collisions is a fun anomoly as long as you can't generate collisions with an algorithm, not anything useful.

Yeah, sure is a good thing that it's not possible to do that with MD5 hashes.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, that's the wrong number. If MD5 were a perfect hash, the chance of a random collision would be 2^64, not 36^32. (I don't know where you pulled that from.)

In practice, MD5 isn't even close to a perfect hash; it's been broken and is no longer suitable for cryptographic applications. You CAN generate MD5 collisions with an algorithm - it's been already found to be susceptible to practical birthday collisions [Wang, et al - CRYPTO 2004]. Second-preimage attacks on MD5 are conjectured to be plausible, just not feasible with the current technique. Unchosen collisions using a given initial value ARE feasible, so an extension attack is also possible. It's expected to go the same way as MD4 and at this stage I would say that using MD5 hashes as a cryptographic checksum or as an investigative technique where someone's liberty hangs in the balance is fundamentally flawed given what we already know.

You've also failed to take into account the number of possible samples; it's not the chance of a given file matching, it's the chance of ANY file on the laptop - or, if this were used for internet filtering, on the internet - matching.

MD5 collisions do, in fact, happen in the wild, on entirely unrelated files.

Funny you should mention DNA too, because the odds that are commonly assumed by laypersons on DNA collisions are also highly overstated, given the limited number of testing points and relative ethnogeographical clustering of the inputs. They don't even close to sequence the whole genome, you know. Indeed, if you've ever read an actual DNA expert witness testifying, they will testify that DNA evidence can only disprove that an individual's DNA matches a sample, and will leave the court to draw a conclusion about the probability of identification given a failure to disprove.

Same's also true for fingerprints.

In respect of the article, they should've got a search warrant for the laptop, and it should be chucked out because of their failure to do so. Generating an MD5 checksum of a file absolutely requires reading the whole file, and reading all the files on someone's harddisk naturally constitutes a search even if the results of the search are presented in an opaque manner.

Given the circumstances, I have no sympathy for the investigative agencies, as they clearly had probable cause to suspect that the laptop contained child porn, and COULD have obtained a suitable search warrant, but chose not to do so, and that should certainly invalidate any evidence they are presenting as a result of that search. It's important that investigative authorities do not regard search warrants as mere procedural inconveniences; more important than any one conviction.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[mpe]

The chances of a md5 collision are more remote than the chances that someone else's DNA at a crime scene will match yours. Want to see for yourself? Get a calculator and do 36^32 and that's the number of different hashes you can get.

DNA certainly isn't random nor is there any reason to assume that MD5's of photographs are.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should read this two year old article on the subject.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but there exists such an algorithm. Can't bother to check the web, but google is your friend.

Some researchers have found a way to produce a file (let's call F2) out of another file (F1) so that F1 != F2 AND md5sum(F1) == md5sum(F2)

AC

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Todd Knarr]

Two words: Mike Nifong.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny you would bring up DNA matching. Isn't the FBI currently trying to suppress research that shows that DNA collisions are far more common than was believed. IIRC, there could be over 10,000 people in the US alone that would match the DNA picked up at any crime scene.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Free the Cowards]

False. MD5 has the property that if you can find two bytestreams that collide, appending identical data to the end will continue to produce two different files that collide. Furthermore, the collision-finders are able to take an arbitrary prefix, and then append random data to that prefix until a collision is found.

What does this mean? It means you can take a file with a blob of random data in the middle, then generate two files with identical hashes but different random blobs of data in the middle.

This, in turn, allows you to do things like create applications, postscript files, HTML files, and other things which hash identically but act or display completely differently. (You embed both behaviors in the file, then switch depending on the contents of the random data. A close examination will turn up the "bad" side, lying inactive, but simply opening the file will make it appear that all is well.)

It's certainly not as good as being able to match an arbitrary hash, but MD5 collisions are entirely practical to take advantage of today.

At this point, MD5 should be considered to be a checksum, not a validator. MD5 is still very good at detecting random noise injected into a data stream but it should no longer be considered to have any real utility for detecting malicious changes.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Chapter80]

I think you missed my point. Even if there are only 4000 known kiddie porn files averaging 50K (BITS!) in size, there are 200 million variations, changing just one bit. And there are almost 200 million * 50,000 changing 2 bits. And there are roughly 200 million * 50K squared changing 3 bits. and there are roughly 200 million * 50K cubed changing 4 bits. (more accurately 200M * 50K * (50K-1)* (50K-2) * (50K-3).)

And you can repeat that math up to 1000 bits (200 million * 50K^1000). 200M is roughly 2^21. Let's convert this to exponentials of 2: 50K is roughly 2^15, and 1000 is roughly 2^10.

So that makes our count of visual variations of kiddie porn to be 2^21*((2^15)^(2^10)), or 2^21*2^150, or 2^171, or some very very very big number. Yes, that's my theory - that you can take 40 perv files, and generate 2^171 variations off of them, with little loss of perversion to the human eye.

Since there are only 2^128 variations of POSSIBLE hashes, and there are 2^171 files to be hashed, then it's almost certain that every possible hash value has some kiddie porn associated with it. (that is, if you have 2^128 mail slots, and 2^171 pieces of mail with random mail-slot addresses, it's near certain that almost every mail slot will have a letter).

And since you have 100,000 files to check, against a list of 2^128 hashes, the vast vast vast majority (if not all) have collisions, you are near certainly going to have a collision. In fact, it's very likely you will have 100,000 collisions! OH NO, autoexec.bat has the same hash as some kiddie porn!

That was my logic. I see now that I understated my case dramatically because the average size would be 50K BYTES not bits.

Realistically, I know that you can catch a crook this way - they're too stupid to change bits, and the cops are too stupid to change bits, but I wanted to show how ridiculous it COULD be, using hashes to catch a perv.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Chapter80]

rats... I bolded an error.... I meant... 4000:

Yes, that's my theory - that you can take 4000 perv files, and generate 2^171 variations off of them, with little loss of perversion to the human eye.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[ChrisA90278]

Get a calculator and do 36^32 and that's the number of different hashes you can get.

That is the number of POSSABLE hashes but are you sure MD5 actually uses ALL of the hash space? Can you prove it. How do you know that there are not a billion hashes that are imposable for the algorithm to compute. If you don't know this how do you know there are not 36^30 imposable hashes?

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Free the Cowards]

Here's a link to some examples.

The postscript example is a dead link. It does have a pair of apps with the same MD5 sum, one of which is a "hello world" program and the other of which pretends to erase your hard drive. It also has a library for creating such programs on your own.

As far as I know, it's not yet practical to create a brand new file unrelated to an existing one which collides with that existing file's hash. So I can't create a file that hashes the same as your file, I can only create a pair of files that hash the same. However, this is only a matter of time.

MD5 is dead for cryptographic purposes, and the time to stop using it for that is yesterday.

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[Chapter80]

No, my point is that if it were legal to search for hashes of porn files, then every one of us could be brought in as a suspect, because it seems to me that zillions of variants of porn can be created with different hash values such that every hash value has a corresponding porn file.

EVERY file has a collision with SOME porn file. and it wouldn't be hard to generate them (it'd take a very long time though).

I've been wrong before. Anyway, thanks for the back-and forth discussion. Catch you in the next thread!

Re:MD5 Collisions...

[IhuntCIA]

And if there is a Collisions, I'm quite sure someone would actually *look* at the file in question before locking you up in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

Actually, looking at *it* is a crime.

The emphasis is mine. I jut made this post to show how wrong is to corrupt law with morale. Law should be equal to all, and by this example, it is clear that some of us have more (or less) rights than others.

What was the chain of custody

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be really scary if I junked a computer and months to years later someone might accuse me of child porn.

Wouldn't you have to prove exatcly where the hard drive was and who had custody of it all all times?

Sounds kindof like those people who give away a junker car without getting the new owner to properly take the title. The new owner gets into a hit-and-run and the state goes after the person who is the owner of record.

Re:What was the chain of custody

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I've understood:

1) Computer Owner was evicted. Left computer behind - maybe to collect later - who knows what the verbal agreement was here, I imagine the PC owner has claimed that we was going to pick it up and that it wasn't abandoned or trash.

2) Home Owner hires someone to clear out the stuff left behind.

3) Hired Person finds PC, and takes custody of PC.

4) Hired Person passes on PC to friend, who therefore has custody.

5) Friend discovers porn, calls police.

So the evidence could be tainted by the hired person and the friend. In addition the owner could have had access. The owner has a grudge against the PC owner as they never paid, it isn't inconceivable that they could have arranged for something to be added to get the person in trouble as punishment.

A proper forensic examination might have resolved what happened. This is unlikely now.

That's a terrible argument

[tjstork]

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

The law exists to serve the public good, and if the public loses confidence in that law, then we have no law at all.

"It's for the children" stuff is not some abstract thing that you can so handily dismiss. With this decision, the courts have just given license to all of those who kidnap or exploit children to make this pornography, by giving them a cash cow.

How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook.

Quite honestly, the judicial tradition of suppressing evidence entirely because it was produced without a proper warrant is absurd. The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there. Instead, fine the police for doing the wrong thing, take it out of their pay, but, still keep the evidence.

This judiciary system is madness.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[BLKMGK]

Or maybe get a proper warrant and follow procedures properly? Sorry, I am no fan of kiddie abusers but if we bent the rules the way you'd like them for this instance then what comes next? I break down your door as an officer, find nothing, and suffer a fine for having made a mistake? Sorry, the officers must follow rules same as you and I or they will become simple bullies. Oh wait....

Better a few guilty men go free on a technicality than allow officers to become a law unto themselves.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Volante3192]

Quite honestly, the judicial tradition of suppressing evidence entirely because it was produced without a proper warrant is absurd.

So you're saying you have no problem with warrentless searches? Shall we continue this thought to it's logical extreme conclusion?

There's a reason the judicial system has the structure it does: so there's a strong trail of evidence, to ensure the rights of everyone involved have not been broken by law enforcement, to ensure nothing has been tampered with.

The law HAS to follow the law, otherwise what authority does it really have to enforce it?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[InsaneMosquito]

How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook.

How would you feel if it was your laptop that was seized without a warrant? "Oh I don't have child porn" you say. Sure...but without that warrant the cops may just plant the evidence. Now what say you?

Or, that friend you let borrow your machine last week, remember him? Yeah, he's not the church going fun loving person you thought. On that USB key with all of his work related stuff was a nice folder of child porn. Its a good thing he copied everything to your machine so you could work together on that big project that boss is asking about.

Or, that teenager in your house, yeah dirty young man. He's out browsing the internet looking for pictures. He accidently clicks on a link with under age "actors". Fortunately, he's a good kid and backs out of the site right away. Didn't look at anything, didn't mean to go there. Hell, you've even trained him well enough to erase cookies and temporary files. Hear that knocking? Yeah, that's the police showing up without a warrent and taking your machine. Oh look, they just found deleted child porn images on your computer. You sick bastard.

Without the warrant you have one more leg to stand on to fight these charges. Its there to protect the innocent.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[RingDev]

The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there.

What evidence? Some md5 hashes that happen to match hashes from a select number of images? Odds are if we hash out every file on your hard drive we will also find matches to that same list. There for, by your own logic, we should arrest you, put your name on the sexual offenders list, and drag you into court, all with out a warrant.

If you really want to live in a country with that much legitimate power in the government, there are numerous flights to China every day.

In short:
Good: Civil liberties defended.
Bad: Possible case against alleged child porn possessor blown.
Worse: Cops too f'ing incompetent/lazy/ill-trained to get a freaking warrant.

The problem here is not civil liberties getting in the way of prosecution, it's the prosecution failing to follow the law.

-Rick

Re:That's a terrible argument

[2short]

"How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook."

How would you feel if it was your notebook I said had a picture of a child in it?

If our judicial system doesn't work right, we should fix it; I'm not taking a position on whether it works right in general. But let's assume we carefully figure out a set of rules and get our judicial system to work right for all manner of crimes from shoplifting to murder; rules that properly balance the rights of the (possibly innocent) accused. Turning around and throwing those rules aside for certain crimes is madness. That's what we mean by "think of the children" stuff: it doesn't help children any to do an intentionally bad job running the justice system for crimes related to children.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[msuarezalvarez]

What evidence? Some md5 hashes that happen to match hashes from a select number of images? Odds are if we hash out every file on your hard drive we will also find matches to that same list.

Actually, odds are the hashes will not match...

Re:That's a terrible argument

[smidget2k4]

No, using wrongfully obtained evidence is madness. If you allow it to be used in court cases, then wrongfully obtained evidence will start happening more and more in different kinds of cases.

Due process will go out the window, and you'll end up with people either fabricating evidence or just walking in to houses w/o warrants and searching whatever they damn well please.

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.

Or if they knew someone was in a particular neighborhood and just turned it all upside down without warrants or permission. Cases can get very personal, and it wouldn't surprise me for a cop to be willing to take a slap on the wrist to use illegal evidence.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[plague3106]

The law exists to serve the public good, and if the public loses confidence in that law, then we have no law at all.

The public needs to stop and think. I for one don't care how much people would prefer to return to Dark Ages mentalities on crime and justice, it doesn't make it a good idea.

"It's for the children" stuff is not some abstract thing that you can so handily dismiss. With this decision, the courts have just given license to all of those who kidnap or exploit children to make this pornography, by giving them a cash cow.

It most certainly can be dismissed. The entire argument boils down to "the ends justify the means." Exactly the opposite of what our founders wanted, and for good reason. Oh, this ruling doesn't give a license to kidnap kids; it means cops must follow proper Constitutional procedure and get a warrant before searching. There are plenty of cases where those exploiting children HAVE been arrested following the letter of the law.

How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook.

Ahh, good old "pleas to emotion" argument. That doesn't change the fact that a warrant should be required. I for one think it's a bad idea for police to be able to barge into anyone's house with cause and perform a search. I feel children are more in danger from that kind of behavior than requiring a warrant.

This judiciary system is madness.

No, you're reactionary knee jerk reaction given the historical evidence of what happens WITHOUT a 4th Amendment is madness. The laws are there to protect the people from the whims of those in charge. You don't believe it's an issue, you don't think it could ever happen... but it can and does all the time, all throughout history. If you're really that scared for your kids, I suggest you never let them out of your sight.

The rest of us will go on, realizing that our children are not in any danger, and that predators are not around every corner.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[tjstork]

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.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[hedwards]

Actually md5s are usually sufficient, it takes a lot of time and energy to determine if the photos really are children. Sometimes it's obvious, but when you're talking about teens, some adult women do look like kids. Unfortunately in many cases without knowing the person it's nigh impossible to determine with any real precision.

The reason why they'd want to use checksums would be that these images aren't generally one offs most pedophiles with pictures aren't making all of them themselves, the hope of using this technique was presumably to find a couple and then do a further search later.

It is also as the judge noticed an end run around the rules involved in procuring evidence and really shouldn't have been allowed into evidence.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Sun.Jedi]

Better a few guilty men go free on a technicality than allow officers to become a law unto themselves.

The largest US gang has a well documented record that would seem to indicate your statement is out of date.

As another everyday example, here's a big surprise, no?

I'm not intending to troll/flamebait here, but MY perception is there is very little accountability for the 'on the job' crew in blue amongst themselves. It is also my perspective that there is very little integrity once one subscribes to the original meaning of the thin blue line.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[mea37]

"The law exists to serve the public good"

No, it doesn't. Government exists to uphold rights, and the law exists to provide government one of the tools to do that. Rights belong to individuals, not "the public".

What makes a child pornographer a criminal is the concrete harm he does to an individual -- not some abstract harm to "the public good".

The system is designed around that. The bill of rights gives weight to the rights of the accused for two reasons. First, it is the job of the justice system to protect everyone's rights -- to defeind the rights of the victim while still respecting the rights of the accused. Second, when we don't respect the rights of the accused, we tend to conflate "accused" with "guilty", and then nobody's rights (including the victim) are protected.

If you dont respect the rules of the system even when they make it harder to catch the bad guy, then you're really asking for a rule-less system that enforces your will. But watch out -- yours isn't the will that's going to prevail if the system heads that way.

"With this decision, the courts have just given license to all of those who kidnap or exploit children to make this pornography"

No, they haven't. They have not made child porn legal; they have reminded the authorities that they still have to do their job according to the rules even when it's a job that really needs to be done.

"How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook."

If we left 'justice' in the hands of how those harmed by the crime feel, it would be revenge (which is not the same thing -- and which incidentally doesn't serve the "public good", either).

"the judicial tradition of suppressing evidence entirely because it was produced without a proper warrant is absurd. The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there. Instead, fine the police for doing the wrong thing"

Here, I agree -- to a point. It doesn't change the fact that in the context of the system as it exists, the court's action is correct, though; today the remedy for illegal search is suppression of evidence.

But yes, I think holding law enforcement personally responsible when they violate the rights of the accused would be more just than penalizing the victim (and any potential future victims) by preventing a conviction when the accused really is guilty -- if such a system can be made to work.

There are two problems with that, though, which I don't know how to resolve:

1) Having performed an illegal search, which results in the conviction of a child pornographer, a police officer goes on trial. What jury will convict him? If the answer is none and that's ok with you, then you're really saying that the accused shouldn't have had rights in the first place.

2) Being personally liable for mistakes can create an incentive to do less work. I'm not saying this justifies a lack of personal accountability in general, but you do have to have a system in which the police are confident "if I do the right thing, I won't be punished". That's harder than it sounds.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[johnlcallaway]

Odds yes.

But no guarantee.

A better check is hash and file size, since it is more difficult for two files of the same size to have the same hash by chance. Especially using compression due to images or videos of the same dimensions reducing to different sizes.

Hash and file size checks are useful for checking if a file is intact and possibly not altered. They are great for lookups.

But, in the end, you still need the file to validate the correct item is found. Hashmaps store both the key and hash for this very reason. The hash is a quick lookup, but the key is needed to verify the right element has been found.

Unless the hash is the same size as the key.....

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Ethanol-fueled]

Miscegnation used to be against the law in many places. Our laws have improved since those days, but who's to say that they couldn't use more improvement?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[silent_artichoke]

He said the game was legally bought. The crack is (I presume) just for the convenience of not having to keep the CD it came on in the drive while playing. Instead, the CD can be safely kept out of harm's way.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[russotto]

Actually, odds are the hashes will not match...

Are you sure? MD5 is broken. If I were a child porn crusader in law enforcement, I might create matched pairs of images, one legit, one child porn (derived from an existing child porn image), with the same MD5, then put that MD5 in the "evil MD5" database. Then I'd distribute the legit ones (perhaps adult porn, perhaps anime, maybe lolcats, anything appealing to a group I think contains a lot of filthy pedophiles) far and wide. Then if I can do MD5 hashes of suspect's laptops without triggering 4th amendment scrutiny, I can use the "evil" hashes as evidence to search the laptop "for real". This ruling precludes that particular dodge.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[theaveng]

>>>"Oh I don't have child porn" you say. Sure...but without that warrant the cops may just plant the evidence. Now what say you?

Even if they don't plant evidence, who wants to go through the hassle of losing their PC for one or two months while the cops scan it for hidden porn (or even stashed drugs). It's not about dishonesty by police, but stopping harassment of citizens. Nobody wants one or two months of their lives wasted just because the government agents have nothing better to do than grab private property.

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

Re:That's a terrible argument

[phuc_head]

NO, the argument is VERY sound. There is due process for a REASON. Yes, if it is my child I would want the person TOOK the pictures to go to jail or even be killed, but what if I was mistaken or what if it was accidentally downloaded. I know of a couple of cases were kids were taking pictures of themselves and then link baiting people so that they would go to the site and download these pictures, also a government agency put up a honey pot somewhere to catch child porn viewers, and someone found it and people started passing the link around and tricking people into clicking it. I would want that person to be locked up, BUT that is not MY job, in a free society, it is the job of a judge and jury to prove that that person did the deed and, if found guilty, to figure out what the level of punishment for that crime is, the judicial branch is there to protect those accused along with those that are offended and with that said laying down well established laws and procedures just so that we find maybe .01% instead of .009% of the people that have child porn on their computers even mistakenly, is not a freedom that i am willing to give up. I don't condone child porn, adult porn on the other hand is A-OK in my book, but i see the "ends justifies the means" augment that tjstrock seems to be condoning and the current law enforcement view is never a good idea. -phuc

Re:That's a terrible argument

[I'm not really here]

Pay attention to his post. He said the cracked game was one that was paid for and that a ridiculous clause of the DMCA makes that cracked copy of an application that he legally paid for and attempted to use in a use that falls under fair use, illegal. Two conflicting laws exist, making it impossible to truly know if you are breaking the law or not, or how it will play out in court - Fair Use Rights and DMCA.

Fair Use explicitly lays out when and how you can use the products you have bought. DMCA limits these rights without having gone through the required process of reforming the original law.

His point was that you should not be afraid of the government. You should not have to fear that having a photo on your laptop of your darling baby boy taking a bath will mean that you will spend years and years in jail for child pornography. His point is you should not have to fear that someone will just burst into your home and search through your entire house, hard drive, etc., without following due process of law. Whether or not the recipient of this illegal search is guilty of something or not is not the issue.

If you want to get angry at someone, get angry at the cops for not following the law and not receiving a warrant to search prior to running the search on this hard drive. It is their fault that this man is now free. It is their fault for not following the letter of the law.

It is better for a hundred criminals to go free and retain our rights to not having unreasonable search and seizure* than for a single innocent man to be placed in jail.

Sounds ridiculous until you are that innocent man.


The Fourth Amendment, for reference: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Re:That's a terrible argument

[RingDev]

Odds of one innocent file's md5 hash matching one identified file's hash md5 is insignificant. But in this case we are talking about and entire hard drive's worth of files compared to a database of all known digital kiddie porn.

Take a PC that has been in heavy use for a few years, you might have a couple hundred thousand files, each of which could collide with any of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of hashes for every known kiddie porn related file on the internet.

Think of it like rolling dice. Rolling a double 6 on a pair of 6 sided dice is a 1/36 chance, but rolling any doubles is a 1/6 chance.

The odds of any single file on your hard drive matching any single file they have on record is significantly better than a specific file on your hard drive matching a specific file they have on record.

-Rick

Re:That's a terrible argument

[KevMar]

I think you were spot on with your argument.
The hash on its own does nothing. The fact that they used MD5 is just complicating how people are looking at it. It's the algorithm behind the search.
What if they created a directory listing of every file name then compared it with one file name at a time from a pre compiled list of child porn image names? What if they use the search feature and typed in each name one at a time? What if it was not names, but full files. Do a bit by bit comparison of every file with a directory of known child porn files? Or what if they just used a MD5 of every file and compared it to the MD5 of known child porn files? Actually, that is what they did. How are any of those any different?
In this case, why didn't they have probable cause to search for porn after an eye witness reported the fact that porn was on the computer? Would it have made any difference if he left it on the display or showed it to the cops? They looked at the computer because they knew it had the child porn on it.
If I am in a car that gets pulled over and my passenger tell the cop I have drugs under my seat, does he need a warrant to search for it? (Honestly, I don't know. That's why I'm asking.)
Isn't it reasonable to conclude that they could still get a warrant based on the eye witness? That would show that they would have eventually found the same files another way to get it back in?
It is possible that I watch too much Law & Order.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[theaveng]

>>>Then don't break the law! What is so hard about not breaking the law.

Without the requirement for a search warrant, you don't have to break the law. The police can enter your home, take your PC, and keep it for a month without ever needing to justify the act. I call that "harassment" and it can NEVER be allowed to happen again.

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.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[msuarezalvarez]

Do you have any file in your computer whose MD5 hash matches the current Google logo?

Of course I am not defending using MD5 hashes as proofs of child porn, leave alone the computation of said hashes without a warrant. I was simply making a claim on the hash algorithm.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Qzukk]

How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook

If you're going to bring emotion, kicking and screaming, into a discussion on legal procedure, let's go all the way: How would you feel if it was your Constitution being ignored?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Foobar of Borg]

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?

You are an idiot and others have already explained why. Even if you break *no* laws (which is almost impossible given how big and complex the legal code is now), should the police be allowed to barge into your place and snoop around whenever they feel like it? You do realize police are human beings, don't you, and can have personal beefs with people. What if a police officer believes you or your wife are the "wrong" color, and wants to continually harass the two of you? You want your door broken in and your house ransacked on a regular basis, even if they never find anything.

Please, go goose-step over to a dictatorship, since you would clearly prefer to live in one.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only true when comparing one-to-one. When you compare a big list of hashes against a big list of other hashes, you don't get nearly the same nice behaviour you get when comparing one hash against a list of other hashes.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[msuarezalvarez]

Can you find a file in your harddrive with the same MD5 hash as the current Google logo?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Richard W.M. Jones]

A better check is hash and file size, since it is more difficult for two files of the same size to have the same hash by chance. Especially using compression due to images or videos of the same dimensions reducing to different sizes.

This isn't much good either, since most JPEG decompressors will ignore stuff appended to the file. A better check is to do some sort of fuzzy matching on the actual image. I guess the reason that law enforcement don't do this is because it's slower than doing "find / -type f | xargs md5sum | grep <badchecksums>".

Rich.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[nine-times]

I'd like to just add on to your post, because I think otherwise part of your point may be missed. The reason this judgement is good is not because it protects people who have child pornography, but because it protects people who don't have it.

If you make an exception and say that it's ok to do otherwise illegal searches so long as you're looking for child pornography, then you've opened a back door for police to search *any* computer under the guise of looking for child porn. So then, some day in the future, some police officer would be able to take your computer without a warrant, scan your hard drive, and then say, "Well, we were looking for child pornography, so what we did was legal, but we found instead this other information. Since the search was completely legal, we can use that information against you."

In effect, it would mean that they wouldn't need a warrant to search computers anymore.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[meringuoid]

Can you find a file in your harddrive with the same MD5 hash as the current Google logo?

As they said, that's comparing one to one. As you start comparing many to many, the number of pairings rises fast and the chances of a hash collision become significant. It's similar to the way that there's a 1 in 365 chance that any given random stranger shares my birthday, but it only takes 23 random strangers to gather together before the chance passes evens that some pair of them shares a birthday - and 57 random strangers before the chance passes 99%.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[YesIAmAScript]

Yeah, it only takes 23 people, because you're selecting from 1 in 365 possibilities.

There are 2^80 MD5 hashes. You're going to need around 2^40 files before you start to have even one collision, and you're still not getting close to matching a particular value, just any two random values.

So, unless the known hash list they are comparing against is larger than 1 million, there's almost no chance of a false collision.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Martin Blank]

The odds of any random non-child-porn file on a system having an MD5 collision with any file in the child porn database is vanishingly small. MD5 is broken such that there may be ways of generating files with the same hash, but random files are going to be so unlikely to match as to be practically impossible.

Still, it's a far better thing to use at least SHA1 hashes, or preferably SHA256 or higher.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Kjella]

Odds yes.

But no guarantee.

Beyond a reasonable doubt is enough, and while it's never really been put into law what that means it's probably around 99%-99.9% somewhere. I certainly wouldn't have a problem believing it if you told me one in a thousand people in jail really is innocent. Even if you have a billion files and they have a billion files, the chance of any one of their hashes matching yours is way, way below that. Anyway the whole discussion is rather silly because I thought the first step in any such procedure is to make a full disk image and work with that, never with live evidence.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Legion_SB]

How would you feel about this man if it was your child's photograph on this man's notebook.

I would ground him for disobeying me. I specifically told him no posing naked for pictures!

Re:That's a terrible argument

[DavidTC]

Exactly. MD5 checks are damn stupid ways to do anything. The only reason the police were doing them is so they could claim it's not a search, and they don't need a search warrant.

When something matches, as it almost certainly will with such a large database of hashes, they then have probably cause and can get a warrant to actually look at files.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[blueg3]

Yes, that's the birthday paradox. I'm not sure offhand how big the NCMEC database is, which is usually what they're comparing against, but let's try some math.

Let's say your hard drive has N files and the database has M items (so, comparing a list of N to another list of M hashes). Your hard drive doesn't actually contain any of the files used to generate the "bad" hash list. The probability of a hash collision is approximately P = 1 - exp( -N*M / (2 * 2^128) ). Assuming the value in the exponent is small, this is approximately P = N*M/2^129. 2^129 is in the rough vicinity of 10^43. In order for you to have a one in a billion (10^9) chance of a false positive, the product N*M would have to be ~10^34. If the hash list has a billion items (I think it's smaller than that, by quite a lot), you'd need 10^25 files on your disk -- well beyond the capacity of readily-available desktop storage.

MD5 hashes are useful because they're resilient to even birthday collisions. What they're not resilient to, it turns out, is intentionally creating two files with the same MD5 hash. (Even then, it is infeasible to generate two files with the same MD5 hash and the same size.)

Re:That's a terrible argument

[moose_hp]

I wasn't aware that you could _easily_ create collitions of an MD5 hash of a file that still keep some sort of order (like creating a perfectly valid jpeg that dosen't turn to show like noise, but an actual meaningful picture, from a MD5). Mind to share your algorithm?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[pigphish]

To further this point, it is more likely that you'll have a duplicate finger print than a matched hash or hash collision.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Jason Levine]

Even if they don't plant evidence, who wants to go through the hassle of losing their PC for one or two months while the cops scan it for hidden porn (or even stashed drugs).

Not to mention the "guilty when accused" attitude of the public. Suppose the police arrest you, seize your laptop, "leak" your name to the media, and they say "Oops, our bad" and let you go. You might not have a single blemish on your record, but the public will think of you as a child pornographer who somehow evaded the police. Every place you go you'll get wary looks. If you have kids, Child Protective Services might make your life a living hell. (I know someone who had CPS called on them by a vindictive neighbor. Even if there's no evidence of any mistreatment, they can still make your life hell.) You might find yourself "downsized" from your job. All because the police were able to arrest you/search you on a whim without any real evidence.

The warrant system isn't perfect. Innocent people still wind up going through the above troubles. But warrants help keep those incidents to a minimum.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[DavidTC]

It's worth pointing out that literally 99.999999% of child porn is made by people who have legitimate possession of the children. Either actual guardians or people temporary watching them.

There is almost no instances of child porn being made with kidnapped children, and it extremely unlikely someone would kidnap children for that, as opposed to incidentally doing it to children they already kidnapped.

Hence, 'child porn' is not placing anyone's children in danger. Not people possessing it, and not even people making it.

The danger is child abuse. It is not child kidnapping, and it's certainly not the entirely hypothetical 'child kidnapping to make porn'.

Child abuse happens almost entirely by people who are entrusted with children, not random strangers.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[msuarezalvarez]

And it is a triviality to apply a filter to all images you own in order to change the hash under any has algorithm you can come up with...

Re:That's a terrible argument

[slim]

Do you have any file in your computer whose MD5 hash matches the current Google logo?

Try: "Do you have any file in your computer whose MD5 hash matches any of the top 130,000 images in Picasa?"

But:

My Windows box has some 120,000 files on it. Let's round that up to 131,072 or 2^17.

Let's assume a perfect hashing algorithm that spreads its hashes through a 128 bit space.

So the chances of any of my files colliding with the hash of a single kiddie porn file are 2^17 / 2^128 = 1 / 2^111

If the police have a database of hashes that's also 2^17 items long, then the chances increase accordingly: 2^17 / 2^111 = 1 / 2^94

2^94 is a very large number.

Even if MD5 isn't perfect, the chances of an accidental false positive are vanishingly small.

Just thought I'd get some facts in. Personally, I still support due process in any criminal investigations.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the things that hashes have a hard time with. The chance that a random file will match the porn list is about 1 in 2^128. The chance that some file on the hard drive will match the porn list is closer to 1 in 2^64. It's still a big number, but not quite as big as you might expect

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

"It's for the children" stuff is not some abstract thing that you can so handily dismiss.

Well, actually, "It's for the children" is a statement that tends to have no factual basis, be unconnected with real children, and be used solely for political force and shock value. Even if you ignore that, it's still a vague, highly abstracted statement.

With this decision, the courts have just given license to all of those who kidnap or exploit children to make this pornography, by giving them a cash cow.

This statement is also based on third-rate logic and abstraction. As best I can parse it, your theory is that, by preventing convictions under unwarranted searches, this will ensure a thriving pedophile economy to boom, driving profits up for child pornographers. If you're going to say something makes something more profitable, say that, instead of "gives license to." Also, I suspect that you're just wrong there, honestly.

I have my own questions on whether discarding the evidence regardless of severity of crime is a good thing, but the tradition itself is important; it's the only real way to control the government's use of search and seizure. A fine won't do it; at the very least, the station could just have an unofficial kitty, and put five bucks a paycheck in to cover the fine if someone wants to bust down a door illegally.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

Sigh.

There are good cops, there are bad cops. There are stations where police are the problem, and there are stations that do their job by the rule of law.

This is a reductionist argument that comes out of the fact that abuses of police power are news, and "Policeman does his job" isn't.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[LeafOnTheWind]

To exceed a .1% chance of finding a match with MD5 (a 128-bit hash) you would need to compare

n(p;H) ~ sqrt( 2*H*ln (1/(1-p)) )

n(.001;2^(32-1)) ~ 2^60

pictures. So to have a .1% of finding a collision of a legitimate picture and malicious picture in the FBI database one would have to compare about 830,000,000,000,000,000 pictures (8.3*10^17). You don't understand what it means to say that "MD5 is broken." Please leave the cryptography to the cryptographers.
 

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

Ummmm.... I'm going to quote you here, alright?

If the law is as important as you say it is, then should we not follow it.

Such as the laws governing unlawful search and seizure?

Also, if you'd actually read his post, he stated a cracked game that was legally paid for (i.e. using a NoCD hack on a game he owns so that he wouldn't have to use the CD, or perhaps getting past copy protection that was misfiring and preventing him from playing the game he purchased).

But even ignoring that, is there relative importance of laws? Yes, sentencing being variable proves that handily. And is it possible to disagree with certain laws, or even believe them invalid based on conflict with higher laws (i.e. DMCA falling before fair use [note: Not claiming this position, just claiming it exists])? I would say yes.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[roystgnr]

I apologize for interrupting the false dilemma here, but would it be a reasonable option to prosecute both the criminal who was caught and the cop who violated the Constitution to catch him? I know, I know, we've got two guilty people on our hands, and our natural, rational instinct is "let them both go unpunished, then set fire to our own hair"... but perhaps there's a way to disincentivize police excesses without giving criminals a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I suppose there's an argument that anyone who would violate the Fourth Amendment can't be trusted as part of a chain of evidence... but in that case, shouldn't the guilty cop be kicked off the force entirely, not just distrusted regarding a single case?

Those are just thoughts in general, though, not necessarily a recommendation for this particular case. Even if it was admissible, I'm not sure I'd want to prosecute someone with evidence like "Look at what we found on his computer, thanks to the help of some guys who felt cheated by him, took his computer, reported incriminating files to us, and totally pinky swear that neither of them put them there themselves."

Re:That's a terrible argument

[lilomar]

KIDDIE PR0N -> MD5SUM -> [MAGIC HAPPENS] -> LOLCATZ

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Uberbah]

There are good cops, there are bad cops.

But the good cops will cover for the bad cops, so you still have no accountability.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

By definition, the good cops WILL NOT. They cease being the good cops, there.

And this ignores the existence of internal affairs, whose whole purpose is to maintain accountability and reduce corruption.

The view of the police as solely an evil or oppressive force is massively reductionist, and at least as naive as the view of them as being solely capable of good actions.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[russotto]

Apparently it is you who misunderstand what it means to say that "MD5 is broken", as the numbers you gave were for an unbroken hash.

It is possible to generate MD5 collisions in reasonable amounts of time. It is possible to generate different meaningful files which have the same MD5 hash in reasonable amounts of time. It is not currently practical to generate a different file which has the same MD5 hash as another existing file, but that's not what I was suggesting.

Here's what our crusader would do

1) Select an existing child porn file

2) Generate two new files. One is crafted to render pretty much the same as the existing child porn file. The other is crafted to look like something which isn't contraband. Both have the same MD5 hash (different from the existing CP file).

3) Enter the new child porn file, and its MD5, in the child porn database. (or, more subtly, distribute it to known child porn purveyors who are about to be busted, and let someone else enter it in the database)

4) Distributed the non-contraband file via legitimate channels.

5) Go after people who are likely to have the non-contraband file, search computer using MD5 tool, and find evil MD5 (on legit file).

6) Use existence of evil MD5 to get warrant to do a thorough search of the computer

See
http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/SoftIntCodeSign/
for an algorithm for creating meaningful files with the same MD5 hash.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[laughingcoyote]

A more accurate question by way of analogy here would be to ask "Can you find a file on your hard drive that matches the MD5 hash of any corporation's logo?" This is a many-to-many match, hashing isn't terribly well suited to that and the odds of a collision raise dramatically that way.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[scot4875]

GP didn't advocate breaking the law. Realize that, and understand what he actually said, and maybe you'll understand why you're wrong and are racking up the Troll mods in this thread.

Here, I'll help: nobody (not even the evil heathen liberals) posting in the thread likes child molesters. You can safely make that assumption about every post you read.

--Jeremy

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Sun.Jedi]

This is a reductionist argument that comes out of the fact that abuses of police power are news, and "Policeman does his job" isn't.

Which 'abuse of power' was not covered up well enough?
Which policeman 'did his job' was covered up successfully?

By definition, the good cops WILL NOT. They cease being the good cops, there.

The good cops may not cover by directly blowing the whistle (har!), however simply not saying anything is the same thing, no? THAT is the basis of the thin blue line.

And this ignores the existence of internal affairs, whose whole purpose is to maintain accountability and reduce corruption.

Cops monitoring cops? Yeah right. Civilians need to monitor cops.

The view of the police as solely an evil or oppressive force is massively reductionist, and at least as naive as the view of them as being solely capable of good actions.

YMMV, your opinion may be different, but I choose not to trust a single one of them. If their own won't say anything because of their 'on the job' brotherhood', how am I supposed to know which one is good or bad?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[this great guy]

it is more difficult for two files of the same size to have the same hash by chance.

This is false. Case in point: the first MD5 collision announced by Wang and his team in 2004 affected 2 data blocks of the same size. More generally, all cryptographically secure hashing algorithms are designed to output a hash as random as possible, no matter what the input size is.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[svank]

Better a few guilty men go free on a technicality than allow officers to become a law unto themselves.

If innocence is no protection from the law, what incentive is there to be innocent?

I don't remember the source or exact wording, but I read that somewhere, and it seems appropriate.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[zippthorne]

That's actually a terrible argument. I mean, the last part is ok, but the paragraph preceeding it really does *not* make your case.

If you've actually got something to hide, you don't have much standing to complain. The protections aren't intended to give criminals the right to get away with stuff, so people getting caught for crimes they did commit, but otherwise wouldn't have been discovered is not a particularly compelling argument against an investigative tool.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

Rodney King (Random example, not perfect, police scandals exist and have been documented throughout history), and your cover-up argument is moronic to begin with, given that what I was actually saying is that "Police do their job" isn't news. No one needs to hide or not hide it, it's just normal (or, at the least, expected/required behavior) and thus below the radar for non-malicious reasons.

My point is that the "Thin Blue Line" mentality you are talking about is not universal or inherent to police or police work. It is a problem WHERE IT EXISTS.

Acknowledging the possibility and existence of corruption is good. Saying "Oh, everything and everyone is corrupt and it's unfixable oh noes!" is worse than useless.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[nine-times]

Bull.

The fact is that there are so many laws on the books that, no matter how clean you are, someone could probably find some evidence that maybe you committed some kind of crime, even if only by technicality.

The protection against unreasonable searches is to prevent harassment. Without that protection, the police could just search your home and your computer on a regular basis, just because they didn't like you or didn't agree with your politics. If someone does that long enough, they can find some obscure law that you've technically broken even if it's something so innocuous that they wouldn't normally prosecute it, and go ahead and arrest you.

The purpose of the 4th amendment isn't particularly to protect criminals who are rightfully under investigation, and though it might protect law abiding citizens from embarrassment, that's not particularly the purpose either. The purpose is specifically to prevent agents of the government from harassing citizens, targeting particular people and digging through their lives looking for acts that might possibly be stretched to be criminal.

Law enforcement can't investigate people they think are bad until they find crimes, but instead they have to go the other direction-- investigating particular crimes until they find the guilty parties.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[silent_artichoke]

LOLCATZ -> KITTY PR0N

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

The basic reason why what you propose is a horrible idea is because there are two outcomes to it:

1) Every officer who looks vaguely like they're acting improperly gets terminated and criminally charged. This might cause some problems with motivation, since doing anything opens one up to accusations of doing it improperly.

2) The punishments are insufficient to deter, and every so often a cop takes a fall to get "that guy we just knew was dirty". Note that the cop doesn't have to know he or she is going to take the fall, though he or she might if the punishment is lenient enough.

Bad idea all around.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Sun.Jedi]

My point is that the "Thin Blue Line" mentality you are talking about is not universal or inherent to police or police work. It is a problem WHERE IT EXISTS.

Where else does it matter as much? Don't say government, because I don't trust them either. Those two aside, where else does it matter?

Acknowledging the possibility and existence of corruption is good. Saying "Oh, everything and everyone is corrupt and it's unfixable oh noes!" is worse than useless.

I don't think I said that. I said I didn't trust a single one of them, and I thought that there should be a better review. I do not think IAD is worth the time.

Hint: Both my parent work(ed) for a police department. I do have some insight into 'how things work', and I don't buy your utopian 'not all of them are bad/corrupt/silent' for a minute.

Free parking, ripped up tickets, or not bothering to even stop known 'on the job' and sometimes extending that privilege to families is an everyday occurrence. Not all that are -really- corrupt fall into that category.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

if we bent the rules the way you'd like them for this instance then what comes next? I break down your door as an officer, find nothing, and suffer a fine for having made a mistake?

That's a slippery-slope fallacy. There is no reason to assume that making an exception once, for a mild breach of procedure, in a case where the accused seems very likely to have committed the crime they're accused of, would inevitably lead to exceptions always being made for serious breaches of procedure in cases where the accused turns out to have been obviously completely innocent.

You are probably right that society as a whole is still better served by allowing guilty men to go free on technicalities, but you have not produced a valid argument to support that position.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

cryptographic hashes don't collide so easily (not even the less than perfect md5 hash). File size is already accounted for.

The chances of a collision in the absence of malice are low enough that if the md5 of two files matches, the most likely explanation is that the contents (and lengths) of the files is identical.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[roystgnr]

Every officer who looks vaguely like they're acting improperly gets terminated and criminally charged.

Interesting theory. Does every officer who looks vaguely like they're acting improperly get evidence rendered inadmissible? No? Then you've got an interesting, clearly incorrect theory.

The punishments are insufficient to deter,

I'd prefer that the punishment be: "whatever a non-cop would get for the same crime". Breaking and entering, wiretapping, etc. are crimes. If our anti-wiretapping laws are sufficient to deter blackmailers, for instance, they ought to also be sufficient to deter jackboots. If they aren't, then that's a separate problem that needs to be fixed regardless.

and every so often a cop takes a fall to get "that guy we just knew was dirty".

Could be. And then we either end up with a crooked cop and a criminal getting punished (good and good) or a crooked cop getting punished while a clean suspect gets reparations (good and not good). Sounds like a win or a wash to me.

Note that the cop doesn't have to know he or she is going to take the fall

So your third theory is that the cops have the ability to frame each other for crimes but not to frame suspects? After all, if you can get someone to take the fall for something they didn't do, why wouldn't a crooked cop just do that to the suspect and cut out the middleman?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

Eh. "I don't trust a single one of them" seems pretty much in line with "Everything and everyone," and you didn't actually make any mention of better review in a fundamental way, just claimed that any review that is internal to the police force is worthless.

"Not all of them are corrupt" isn't utopian by a longshot; it's right down the middle. "They're all corrupt" is dystopian.

Have your parents been involved in every police department in every city in the world? This is part of the problem: people who have experience with some members of a group making sweeping generalizations.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[BLKMGK]

I'd be with you on this if I didn't see thin blue line stickers on so damned many cars driving the roads in my area! I can sit at a light, look around, and often see at least one of those stickers placed on a vehicle around me. Speaking to someone I know who was married to an officer I got quite the education on how she had been let go out of speeding tickets and other infractions after first proving that she was married to an officer. The sticker is seen and infractions allowed to slide by. An officer who tickets someone who is "family" isn't treated well by fellow officers.... So yeah, I have an issue there. There should be NO distinction and yet there is - and a very clear one at that it seems.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

I do have to say that this mentality IS a big problem in law enforcement, and does need to be dealt with. I'm just very uncomfortable with the "It's 100% of cops" aspect, and with viewpoints that only take into account the bad things police do, and ignore the actual services and benefits that police provide to citizens.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should start smoking again.

What a pity, i have mod points but your already at -1.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Care to provide us with two files that have the same md5 and are images?

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about dishonesty by police, but stopping harassment of citizens.

On the contrary, it is indeed about dishonesty by the police. Have you heard of the abuses by the members of the LAPD Ramparts division? They terrorized and tortured anyone they wanted. They carried "throwdown guns and knives" to plant on anyone they executed as a reason to claim their lives were in danger. They were as corrupt as anyone outside the present administration.

Cops in general have it far too easy -- whatevr errors they commit are usually dismissed with a wave of the hand and an assertion that "they were acting in good faith."

An ungodly number of boats, cars and homes have been seized in Florida by corrupt cops who carried a little pot to cast into a corner to be "detected" by drug sniffing dogs. And all because of some fucked-up, purchased legislators who wiped their collective asses with the due process clause when they allowed preemptive seizure of "presumed fruits of drug trafficking" with no meaningful due process.

The first thing they should be doing in these cases is to corral every god-forsaken cop who has had access to the property and scope thm out with the drug sniffing dogs. Only if they come up clean should they be allowed to check out the property in question. And there should be no allowance for bullshit excuses like "the poor dumb cop must have stepped on the property owner's pot during the initial investigation."

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Nazlfrag]

Resilient sure, but collisions can still occur with any hash, no matter that the possibility is extremley remote. There's already a flawless way to see if two files match - diff. MD5s should be used to streamline the investigative process, not as a proof of guilt.

Oh, and some disagree with your analysis.

In addition, the 128-bit output is arguably not long enough to make generating collisions using a birthday attack infeasible.

Another post in this thread also noted that you can generate a collision with identically sized files.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Thundersnatch]

A better check is hash and file size...

Actually, the hash function already includes the file size. The padding algorithm for all widely used cryptographic hashes uses the byte length of the file as part of the padding.

So, simply using a longer hash function is a much better way to reduce false-positives. SHA-256, for example, would make the chances of collision on the order of 2^(-128). SHA-512 or Whirlpool would result in collision probability of 2^(-256).

Re:That's a terrible argument

[blueg3]

They're not proof of guilt, just used to streamline the investigative process.

While I agree that computing MD5 hashes constitutes searching, one of the useful properties of doing that first is that it's less invasive than looking at all the individual images on the hard drive. It's also less time-consuming.

The major motivation for MD5 hashing is that the database of known child pornography is not distributed in its entirety to every state and local investigative group. The database of hash values, however, is. If there are files on the investigated machine whose hashes match hashes for known CP files, then further investigation is done.

If you tried to convict someone based off of a hash match, and the files didn't actually match bit-for-bit, any competent defense lawyer would be able to kill the value of that "evidence".

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Sun.Jedi]

just claimed that any review that is internal to the police force is worthless.

I am in favor of civilian review. I am in favor of harsher penalties for those who break the same laws they are tasked with enforcing.

This is part of the problem: people who have experience with some members of a group making sweeping generalizations.

If I would only see a police officer driving normally, it would go a long way towards changing my mind. However if the simplest of traffic laws are not important enough to be adhered to or enforced there really is no evidence to suggest that other laws are either.

I do respect your opinion, but I don't consider my choice to be terribly moonbat-ish. I have a lack of faith in the system, a lack of trust for the relatively unsupervised and unaccountable officers, and a very little voice in changing that. My only recourse is open distrust.

That is close to your comment a post or two ago, but without the 'flapping my arms, yelling at the rocks' slant I inferred from that comment.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[plague3106]

An excellent point as well. I was attempting a more general argument, as it seems that there's a growingly popular perception that government can do no wrong.

Specifically though, I saw a local news report interview a local sherrief, how said exactly what you have stated. The sherrif then proceeded to push for police to protect children from strangers and the need for the Amber alert system. It was truely mind boggling that he felt police efforts and resources were best spent going after the 3% of strangers that would abuse a child and not the families.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

It's similar because, honestly, my position is the same. You're still arguing for a fairly dystopian view of law enforcement in total, and I still don't buy it.

For instance, while I don't know if there is a particularly bad set of cops where you live, I've seen plenty of cops driving normally. I've also seen them speeding and/or ignoring traffic laws.

What I've seen much more often is them obeying traffic laws. But what's much more memorable is them not obeying traffic laws, because it stands out.

Also, I'm not seeing where I have been rude or irrational in this thread, and I'm sorry if you've felt yelled at.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Sun.Jedi]

Also, I'm not seeing where I have been rude or irrational in this thread, and I'm sorry if you've felt yelled at.

You haven't been rude or irrational. I'm not upset. The quote I inferred the ranty-arm-flapping from is this:

Saying "Oh, everything and everyone is corrupt and it's unfixable oh noes!" is worse than useless.

The mental picture "ohnoes!" has a story that I associate. I've said that in the past on purpose, complete with arm flapping along with something about stoleded megahurtz.

Although we disagree in outlook, and philosophy to an extent, its been an enjoyable, thought-provoking discussion from my point of view.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[ivan256]

Did you even read the parent post? I don't think you did. Certainly nothing you said indicates you did.

A match of a legitimate image that was intentionally planted to match an illegal image who's hash is in the database has nothing to do with chance at all.

The reason people oppose these types of things isn't because they support child molestation and child pornography. It's because they understand how easy it is to falsely accuse somebody, and how effective that would be at removing the target from society. Nobody wants to be that guy who had his life essentially ended due to a false kiddy porn rap.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Count Fenring]

Glad to hear it.

Occasionally my desire to inject humorous phrasing into my slashdotting backlashes on me ;-)

Re:That's a terrible argument

[LeafOnTheWind]

I did account for the weaknesses of md5. To achieve the collision, one has to have the ability to control or modify both images. The file you linked managed to do it because they could just add garbage onto the end of an executable. Even if you could enter it into the database, the first thing that I would compare to check if two files are equal is if they are the same size. It's completely obvious and simple. Your attack may work in theory, but it would never work in practice.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[RhadamanthosIsChaos]

That's an interesting argument, and I can see your point. One issue I could see with it though is that for serious crimes like murder or child pornography, the cop might be more willing to violate the constitution to catch the person... assuming they're guilty.

This could lead to lots of cases of cops violating the constitution with an "ends justify the means" mentality, unless we also put some pretty harsh punishment on violating rights.

Really, I think we'd end up with just as many people locked up as we have now, only half of them would be cops who decided it was worth it to push their luck.

Re:That's a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to add another scenario:

Your innocent 16 year old daughter? Yeah. She wants attention too. And she's not above showing her tits off on 4chan with the camera she borrowed from you without you even knowing.

Now explain why you have these pictures of your daughter which are clearly taken by your camera -- both EXIF info and the fact that portions of the pictures are recoverable off your SD card.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[tripdizzle]

"some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files." Wait, so law enforcement has a database of kiddie porn and kiddie porn md5's? Some perverted bureaucrat found himself the right job.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[Markimedes]

You know that's probably why they made the md5's? Because they didn't want to actually store the porn?

Otherwise they would just do a binary comparison.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[tripdizzle]

I knew that, I just felt like making a joke, but someone had to look at it before it was hashed.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[Markimedes]

They should have children do it. They are pure and sinless, and it wouldn't scar them for life.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[darkmeridian]

Actually, it's a terrible job. There's a guy out there who has to look at all the child porn and verify that it is in fact child porn. There's also a guy out there who has to look at videos of brutal murders to try and figure out who did what. I'm sure these guys aren't too happy about their jobs but realize it's a necessary evil if you want to hunt down those who commit these crimes.

I know a guy who works for Google. His job is to look at porn all the time. He has to verify that SafeSearch has accurately censored out sexual images but leaves women in bikinis alone. You think it'd be a good job, but it actually has desensitized him to sex. He is now blase towards sex, much to the consternation of his gf.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[silent_artichoke]

That was so wrong that I was cracking up for 5 minutes straight!

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[Tekfactory]

During a Forensics training session I attended, we were told by the instructor who works in Law Enforcement that the hashes are sent to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They have a database of hashes for known images and videos. Like an anti-virus vendor, if they don't have a matching hash for a previously unknown, but verified file they can add it to their database.

Whether the DOJ, FBI or anyone else has their own version, I do not know.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely correct, though it's the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

There's also a few interesting things that are done with the files to get around the old, "oh, I'm so smart, I'll just change a pixel or crop it," arguments but that's another story. Suffice it to say that's not nearly enough.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[Kjella]

"some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files." Wait, so law enforcement has a database of kiddie porn and kiddie porn md5's? Some perverted bureaucrat found himself the right job.

Yeah, because MD5s are so exciting - que a Matrix moment here. Seriously though, they not only keep the MD5 but the files themselves too to try finding clues, patterns and so on, they can be made one place but turn up for the police on a suspect's computer halfway around the earth. Apart from the investigations, it's also because of the "these images are just realistic photoshops" defense. It's kinda tough when they slam the case file of some solved investigations with real life people on the table though. If you want the job of actually looking at it be a police officer on a special unit - most people don't want it and if you really want to watch a little kid that's raped/killed you have a lot bigger problems than being a pedophile.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[blueg3]

They actually have a database of the original files. The reason for the hash list is that the hash list is distributable to investigators, but the original material is not. This way they can find images that are "known child porn" (so they don't need to go through the process of verifying that it actually is) and can relate images found on a drive to previous cases involving the same image.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[hansamurai]

I once saw an interview with a few of these people that work for the FBI, however, the interviewer really botched it all by trying to ask stupid questions like "has anyone ever been fired for taking the pictures home?" instead of actually getting into the emotional toll it must wreak on these people (most of whom were women if I remember correctly).

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[theJML]

Makes you wonder if these MD5's collide with any other files that aren't even images... Also makes you wonder where this huge server is with loads of kiddie porn, and what price did we pay the government to search for, download, store, and md5 sum it?

Seems kinda odd to me to do things this way, I mean what if the dude had other images (God forbid he actually be the photographer and have not yet distributed ones) or ones that he'd recompressed or cleaned a water mark off of or something (which could be scripted), they wouldn't have had the same MD5 sum, but they'd still be kiddie porn. So he'd have been set free then? What an ineffecient system! Oh, nm, that's right, forgot the court tag was up there.

Re:Law Enforcement Storage of Naughty Things

[Stray7Xi]

Wait, so law enforcement has a database of kiddie porn and kiddie porn md5's? Some perverted bureaucrat found himself the right job.

It could be worse, it could be a puritan that decides whether things are child porn or not. I'd hope there's adequate controls to properly tag things as child porn.

Do they look at an image and decide "She looks under 18". What if it's an photoshop or animation? What if it's clearly a child, no naughty bits are showing but it's provocative? (There was a cd cover to an old cd that was later banned as a child pornography.. sold in the stores and everything) What if it's just youthful innocence? (Oh look our three year old is running around naked again, take a picture it's cute).

Yes.

[Markimedes]

Yes, I would qualify parsing someone's file system into file sized chunks and processing them bit by bit and feeding that data into a hashing algorithm as searching.

Error made by Slashdot in headline

[bfwebster]

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..

Re:Error made by Slashdot in headline

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you can't accuse the editors of not doing anything anymore.

Re:Error made by Slashdot in headline

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Well the 'editors' have to do something.

Re:Error made by Slashdot in headline

[bfwebster]

Well the editors have to do _something_.

You're speaking to a published writer -- that hits a lot closer to home than you may realize. :-) ..bruce..

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Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they mantain such database, I would expect that ISP filters in some countries also check on traffic and compare against this database.
I wonder how many unsuspecting downloaders were caught this way. (there are many of them who probably know how to never get caught though).

Still, all this pedophilia hype shows how effective society can be at censoring certain information.

unless there is more to the story

[Phizzle]

Unless there is more to the story, which is not obvious from the RTFA, the evicted party forfeits the rights to what they chose to leave behind during the eviction. I am a firm believer in due process (14th) and in the 4th amendment, but again, I do not see how they apply here. In this one rare case court seems to have gone overzealous on the technological aspect of the case.

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I love how...

[kuzb]

...we speak of finding now inadmissible evidence that someone is collecting/distributing child porn, and you guys tag it as "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense". Really, people.

Re:I love how...

[Fished]

I'm probably best known on Slashdot as being a rabid conservative (at least from the point of view of the typical Slasdotterati--check out my history), but in this case, I agree with the Slashdot consensus. Civil rights are only meaningful if they apply to the worst of our society. I have no sympathy with this man's crime, but it is evident to me that the police should have gotten a warrant before "hashing" his hard drive. That they failed to do so is inexcusable, and the recognized remedy in these cases is for the tainted evidence to be excluded.

Re:I love how...

[MikeBabcock]

Bad police work is bad police work, no matter the criminal.

Here's a clue: be upset with the stupid officers that could've followed procedure and actually nabbed the guy instead of being lazy and screwing up the case instead of the judge for enforcing the law.

These are YOUR freedoms too.

Re:I love how...

[mikeee]

Well, yes and no. The court apparently ruled that the hard drive was searched; it's not clear at this point if it was ok to do the search (because it wasn't his hard drive anymore) or not. The DA had hoped to avoid any doubt on that point by arguing that just taking md5 hashes and seeing if they match wasn't a search... which, of course, it is.

Re:I love how...

[rhsanborn]

Just because we don't always like the results of due process and the application of the Constitution doesn't nullify the idea that it is indeed good to see it (although infrequently) upheld.

I'm pretty sure that suddenoutbreakofcommonsense wasn't in reference to letting pedophiles free, but was rather in reference to defense of the Constitution.

Please don't take the above as an opinion on the judgement indicated on the article. I'm not making one, but rather as an explanation in contrast of the above comment.

Re:I love how...

[jo_ham]

Because this is about the legal system. the offence (regardless of how heinous it is) is irrelevant.

I want child porn surfers and child molesters arrested and put away as much as the next guy, but you can't throw out the legal system to do it.

Re:I love how...

[GameMaster]

According to a post higher up, the court addressed that issue and found that he had not abandoned his property.

Re:I love how...

[mpe]

Here's a clue: be upset with the stupid officers that could've followed procedure and actually nabbed the guy instead of being lazy and screwing up the case instead of the judge for enforcing the law.

Especially if those involved havn't been fired.

Re:I love how...

[ivan256]

The recognized remedy should be severe punishment of the officers involved and their superiors. Along with the exclusion of the evidence.

It's worth nothing that if they can show probable cause for the search without using the results of the search, then they can probably still get the warrant and nail this guy.

Re:I love how...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad police work is bad police work, no matter the criminal.

Here's a clue: be upset with the stupid officers that could've followed procedure and actually nabbed the guy instead of being lazy and screwing up the case instead of the judge for enforcing the law.

You have it exactly right on all counts.

When a citizen runs afoul of a law he didn't even know about, the cop is quick to throw his nose in the air and declaim, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

But when the cop cuts corners so he can sit at the station poking donuts down his piehole instead of doing his job, it's all, "Ahhh, yes, but it was a minor error. And besides, the poor dumb fellow 'was acting in good faith.'"

Damn that double standard. The cop has presumably been fully schooled in what he may and may not do. In detail. But, from their behavior, it appears that most of the classes were in subjects like how to skirt the edges of the law, how to turn any encounter with a citizen into an arrestable offense and how to extort concessions on the citizen's rights by bullying tactics.

I recently saw an account on the evening news where a man, who admittedly lived in the wrong part of town and looked and dressed the part, was jacked by the cops. They were looking for one or more of his sons. He denied knowledge of their whereabouts. He was warned at various times that any untruth could be charged both as lying to a police officer and as obstruction of justice, good for seven years apiece. He was also old that, if it could be proven that he did in fact know where the kids were, a separate charge of harboring fugitives would come into play, good for another seven years.

Jesus Christ -- they were ready to charge him with seven years per word of the simple sentence -- "I don't know" -- for a total of twenty-one years. That's raw extortion, at the kindest assessment.

I was at a large dinner some time back. The sons of two different couples I knew were sitting near me. One was in the later years of law school. The other was in the local police academy. The cop-to-be was anguishing about situations where proof was hard to come by in some cases. The lawyer-to-be was counseling him in how to make the best use of poor or lacking evidence. I was appalled that the focus was on making a charge stick rather than doing honest police work.

On another occasion, I and another driver came upon the scene of a rollover accident. The other person had witnessed a feud between the drivers of a VW bug and and a pickup truck. The bug driver, whose car had rolled, was fleeing the scene. They had been in a pissing contest to see who could cut each other off and the bug driver lost.

The roadway was littered with empty beer cans and full shotgun shells. The rollover, still on its wheels, was in the center of three lanes and around a curve. So we set out flares and started kicking the shells and cans off to the side so as to minimize he hazard. Nearby homeowners called the cops. The SOB who arrived gave us nothing but shit. While we thought we were making things safer for other drivers who might come by, the bastard lectured us both on how he could arrest us for "interfering with the scene of an accident." Fuck that. When the firemen came, the cop left us standing around in the cold while he went over to play patty-ass with the firemen. When the ambulance arrived, both groups strenuously ignored the ambulance driver and his assistant, because, as everyone knows, cops and firemen are real men and, to these heroes among men, mere ambulance drivers are "just a bunch of faggots".

Re:I love how...

[MikeBabcock]

I wish I could post and moderate in the same discussion, this made me almost spit my coffee out:

When a citizen runs afoul of a law he didn't even know about, the cop is quick to throw his nose in the air and declaim, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

But when the cop cuts corners so he can sit at the station poking donuts down his piehole instead of doing his job, it's all, "Ahhh, yes, but it was a minor error. And besides, the poor dumb fellow 'was acting in good faith.'"

Damn that double standard.

I was sitting at the bar yesterday watching "one of those cop shows" that follows highway patrol vehicles with two cops at the bar. I made sure to regularly comment on the abusive behaviour of the police on the show and how it made me feel as an educated citizen toward their otherwise useful role in society.

Hopefully I don't get random tickets today.

It doesn't matter.

[mcgrew]

What good is a phone call if you're unable to speak, Mister Anderson?

From one of my journals last year:

The cops called her number, and the boyfriend siad he'd locked the screen by mistake. They gave Chris a ride home. "We'll close your gate for you", the cop said, "and your garage door."

My garage! "My lawnmower!" I exclaimed.

"It's ok" the cop said, "we opened it to look around."

So much for the 4th amendment on the day we remember the fallen heros who died defending the Constitution.

It also journals an attempted drug bust ("attempted" because there were no drugs).

Yeah, this SOUNDS like good news, but so long as law enforcement and the legislature holds the Constitution in the utter contempt that they do, it doesn't really matter what the court rules.

Liberty? What Liberty?

Re:It doesn't matter.

[UseTheSource]

That's what scares me about this presidential election. If Obama wins, the far left will have control of the executive and legislative branches of government. With the Justice Department, federal law enforcement and the military under their control, they can pass and enforce whatever they like, and if the judiciary has a problem with its constitutionality the new prez can just tell them to get bent. Once a couple of far left, activist SCOTUS justices are appointed, that won't even be a problem anymore.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[rootofevil]

so you mean youre scared of living in an environment that everyone not on the right has been living in from 2000-2006?

Re:It doesn't matter.

[jedidiah]

Blame the "maverick" fighter jock. I was all set to vote
for McCain until he picked NeoCon Barbie for his running
mate. I respected both candidates pretty much equally
until the RNC and I would have been quite willing to cast
my vote with "maintaining the balance of power" in mind.

I am with Buckley on this: "I didn't leave the party, it left me."

Re:It doesn't matter.

[mcgrew]

First, it's been said that we have no far left here - the rest of the world considers Democrats slightly right of center, while they consider the Republicans far, far right.

Secondly, the Democrats and Republicans differ only in two respects:

1. Which constitutional rights they want to take away first (e.g., the Republicans hate the 4th amendment while the Democrats hate the 2nd)
2. Which foreign owned corporations finance their campaigns and who they are beholden to

Personally, I don't think either Obama or McCain will be a good President, and I've journaled that whoever wins the election really loses; he will be the 21st century Herbert Hoover.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

No -- The left are fucking socialists and the right are fucking fascists. The original spirit that founded the Nation is dead

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

I am with Buckley on this: "I didn't leave the party, it left me."
No Buckley left that party, for a lefty(his words, not mine) whom he wants to believe (since Barack is such a great writer and went to Harvard) won't do all things that a Democratic Congress will force him to do. Buckley's endorsement of Obama was more a slap in the face of McCain for picking Palin. Damning with faint praise comes to mind. Mr. Buckley shares that unfortunate and false nostalgia that US elections are determined by well informed voters making calm, rational decisions, rather than the ugly truth of a slobbering horde selecting which ever candidate will feed their current appetite.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[maxume]

Bush seems to be getting quite a lot of the Hoover comparisons. Even from the crazy right (Art Laffer probably isn't crazy, but he sure is pretty far right ideologically):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122506830024970697.html

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny to see this perspective. From the viewpoint of almost everyone else, the dems are right wing and the repubs ultra right. You have no clue about what even a moderately left wing (see eg 1960s Britain) or really socialist (eg present sweden) would be. Lower infant mortality, better health care, higher educational achievement, higher standards of living, longer lifespans and less constitutional restriction. Terrible what those socialists do, isn't it?

Re:It doesn't matter.

[mcgrew]

That's because everyone but my grandma blamed the depression on Hoover. But Hoover had only been in office less than two years when the stock market crashed; it was the Coolige years that caused it - that's what the linked journal is about. The similarities between the 1920s and 1998-2008s are astonishing.

Like I mention in that journal (and three later ones), I was assigned a textbook titled "Only Yesterday" by Frederick Lewis Allen in an undergraduate history class in 1978. That book is now online, hosted by virginia.edu (linked and quoted in the journal).\

Unlike most of my journals, the Hoover journals are SFW.

The linked article says "If you thought they did a bad job running the post office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the military, just wait till you see what they'll do with Wall Street."

The post office does an incredible job; less than half the price of FedEx or the brown trucks, and fast, too- as fast as UPS and almost as fast as the incredibly expensive FedEx. Amtrak gets my goat with their fluctuating fares, but they do a far, far better job than their closest competetitors, the airlines. As to th emilitary, the US military can kick anybody else's military even if outmanned ten to one. The only losers in his list are the two banks.

"Whenever people make decisions when they are panicked, the consequences are rarely pretty."

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy's cover, in large friendly letters, is absolutely correct. A lot of people are going to get hurt, but if you can hold on to your job and your house you'll come out ahead.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Count Fenring]

Yeeeeah.... because threats to our constitution and human rights have been coming out of the left lately.

See George W. Bush. See where the Patriot act and its successors have come out of. See which Supreme Court justices have been upholding Guantanamo, and which ones dissenting.

In summary, try and think for a change, instead of responding to the emotional weight that the term socialism has.

Also, to think Obama is a socialist, you have to be either uninformed, misinformed, or stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say number two.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Pichu0102]

To be fair, with a name like Hoover, your life's probably going to suck in the first place.

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I don't think 4th amendment applies in this case..

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest issues I see with going 4th amendment rights on this is the fact that the defendant doesn't own the computer anymore. From the article he lost it because of problems not paying rent. It changed hands to an uninvolved third party who noticed the files were on, now his, computer. He did what I would see as the right thing reporting it. He allowed the policy to look over the computer.
 
Does it count as a search? Yes without a doubt.
 
Does it break 4th amendment rights? If it still belonged to the defendant, sure, but it didn't at this point.

auto hash changer

[cinnamon colbert]

don't child porn creeps and ordinary privacy obsessed /. ers have a utility whihc automatically changes any file of type x so that the hash changes ?

I don't know anything about computing, but it can't be that hard to have a utility which automatically edits any .tif or.doc or .mp4 so that the MD5 hash is changed ?

Re:auto hash changer

[PJ1216]

Yea, it is extremely easy to do. However, some people don't take those precautions. Just because its easy to change MD5s, I'd still call negligence if police didn't search for unmodified MD5s. Its like a parent refusing to search the sock drawer for weed because they assume their kid must hide it somewhere else. Even if you did assume that, you still check. (Disclaimer: I'm not advocating parents searching through their kid's stuff nor am I saying that weed is good or bad... I'm just trying to think of an example.)

Re:auto hash changer

[Terrasque]

If you're going to take precautions, then just encrypt it.

Hell, Windows even have built in encryption, which is keyed to your login password, and really easy to turn on. Not too secure (depends on your login password, leaks file name), but it would have stopped this pretty easily.

why not?

[mikeee]

Even if he thought the search was ok, if he wasn't 100% sure, the DA was just giving himself a second chance to win by arguing it wasn't a search at all. He wins if either argument holds up, so why not make both? (And he has to make them in that order; you can hardly argue 'the search was legal, and also, we didn't search it'.) This is standard legal tactics.

It's a Redundant Array of Independent Arguments.

MD5 is broken. All odds are off.

[ciroknight]

But since anyone can manufacture files that match known MD5s, the minute said "Child-porn hash database" gets published (which, if you look hard enough, they already have been), all bets are off.

Re:MD5 is broken. All odds are off.

[YesIAmAScript]

MD5 is not "broken".

If it is, go find the me the program where you input a md5 hash and it trivially makes a file to match it.

There have been several attacks against MD5. Some make it easier (but not nearly trivial) to make colliding files.

But one thing to remember is that many of these attacks don't change the content of the file significantly. They are trying to attack the situation where someone writes a file that says "give this guy $1 from my bank account" and signs it, and the miscreant wants to change it to "give this guy $100,000 from my back account" and have the signature match. They have changed only one important part of the file and accomplished their goal.

But in the kid porn file case, this is useless, because if you corrupt 1% of a JPEG, the JPEG is still over 95% intact, and I assure you that you can get convicted of having kid porn even if 5% of each image is garbage.

Additionally, most of the "breaks" of MD5 are where the message you are trying to match is specially constructed to be easy to match up to. In this case, the files are presumably not of that form (it would be unusual if they were) and so that class of attacks don't work.

Cops blow it again

[russotto]

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.

Re:Cops blow it again

[hattig]

Indeed the defendant had reported the computer as stolen.

The police officer who said that the owner of the PC had given permission to search the PC had been informed that the PC had been reported as stolen earlier.

To be honest it really looks like the police messed up big here.

Sorry to reply to myself, but...

[I'm not really here]

The asterisk was supposed to link to the Fourth Amendment comment at the bottom... I've really got to proofread my own stuff more often.

Re:Sorry to reply to myself, but...

[nospam007]

"I've really got to proofread my own stuff more often."

Obl. You must be new here!

Re:Sorry to reply to myself, but...

[I'm not really here]

Couldn't you tell by the 1.3 million userID? :-P

Make the strongest argument

[hellfire]

Because a lawyer's job is to make the strongest argument. The stronger argument is that the person who "owned" the computer called the police. The question then becomes did the owner give the police proper permission. If they did, then that's the strongest argument. If they did not, then they went with this argument because it's all they had.

And if someone screwed up, that person needs to be slapped around for not following proper procedure.

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Oddly enough

[Anonymous Coward]

the same sort of people don't give a shit that future generations will have to clean up the crap we're putting out.

"Think of the children but only while it doesn't affect ME!" is the *real* cry.

Re:I don't think 4th amendment applies in this cas

[PrimeWaveZ]

I haven't read the whole opinion, because IANAL, and I hate the bloviating that goes on in them.

It seems, though, that if the property was forfeited by its original owner, and the new owner of the property provided it to the police because of things that the previous owner did to it, there should not be a legal issue.

It's kind of like when Paris Hilton failed to pay the rent on her Public Storage (or whatever) space, and the landlord sold the property inside. When the nudie pictures and private journals inside were made public, she had no legal recourse because it was NO LONGER HER PROPERTY by virtue of her non-payment of rent and the statutory forfeiture of the contents of the space.

Then again, I just tried to cite Paris Hilton in a legal argument. Whatever...

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Hate to rain on your parade...

[gillbates]

But the recent civil forfeiture provisions for copyright infringement they're trying to get signed (maybe already signed?) into law will allow them to do the same thing. The Feds can already seize your property on the mere suspicion that it is being used for illegal drug activity, and are not required to even file charges. When said seizure happens, the burden of proof is on the owner prove that it wasn't used for illegal activity.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade...

[King_TJ]

This sort of thing is all part of the move to the "New World Order" that presidents like Bush have spoken about fondly in several speeches in the last decade.

The majority in the USA apparently haven't learned from history, so now we're doomed to repeat it.

I predict a quick slide towards Socialism in U.S. govt. over the next 4-8 years. Our Constitution doesn't sound ALL that different from the ones written for countries like the U.S.S.R. Like them, we'll reduce it to a piece of paper that is only paid lip service to - and the masses will grumble a bit, but probably accept it, as they've been "boiling the frog" slowly, for a long time now.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade...

[calmofthestorm]

I don't see socialism, I see facism as corporations grow more and more massive with government monopolies granted to stifle competition into some liberterain nightmare.

The end result is the same as communism, but it is an important distinction. No rights, exploitation of poor by rich, etc etc.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade...

[alecwood]

Ho can anyone prove something has never been used for an illegal purpose, other than perhaps proving it's never been used at all

Re:Hate to rain on your parade...

[King_TJ]

I think some of it depends on who gets elected. I see McCain taking us ever further towards facism, while Obama will take us down the path of socialism instead. Either way, as you said, our nation winds up in essentially the same place in the end.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade...

[RhadamanthosIsChaos]

I think what you're actually predicting is a quick slide toward totalitarianism. You know, like the U.S.S.R. really was, despite their claims otherwise.

When you claim that something like that was "Socialism", you miss out on any positive aspects of socialism. Pretty much every government mixes elements of capitalism and socialism, so I would say you're painting with too broad a brush.

Re:I don't think 4th amendment applies in this cas

[hattig]

It wasn't a legal eviction, that's why that argument wasn't invoked. In effect, the computer was stolen. The defendant even reported it as stolen way before the child porn was reported.

It is a massive cock up by the police. If they had done things by the book it might have been alright, but to be honest I think the chain of custody of a stolen PC would pretty much erase any case they would have.

Re:I don't think 4th amendment applies in this cas

[mpe]

The biggest issues I see with going 4th amendment rights on this is the fact that the defendant doesn't own the computer anymore. From the article he lost it because of problems not paying rent. It changed hands to an uninvolved third party who noticed the files were on, now his, computer.

It's also impossible to prove that anything found on the computer is anything to do with the defendant. The rent dispute is an obvious motive for the former landlord to take all sorts of malicious actions.

Whose is it though?

[phorm]

The question of whom generated the illegal content then becomes an issue in my mind. Seems that there were at least three other people who have likely had access to the computer (Landlord, Sell, Hipple). So what's to say one of them wasn't downloading illegal content.

Moreover, let's say that the landlord has long-standing issues with the computer's owner (heck, I don't think you can just *seize* property anyways without a court order???), so he gets Sell or Hipple to plant a little "evidence" against his disliked tenant and then call it in.

What about the jury?

[phorm]

My question would be: what if the age of the girls themselves is in question. Does that mean that the jury has to review a ton of nasty pictures and make the assessment, or is the testimony of an "export" good enough?

Jury duty in those cases would really suck. But then again jury duty on any cases involving kids as victims probably isn't very pleasant.

Re:What about the jury?

[u38cg]

Usually in these cases there isn't any doubt about what's involved. Most people who have a collection of maybe-underage girls also have plenty of definitely underage.

Visualizing the md5=search issue

[NetSettler]

This sounds like a good ruling to me at first blush.

The functional effect of an md5 hash is effectively equivalent to taking a photograph if the item were something visual. Consider the following hypothetical:

You're accused of a crime and the police can't search your house because they don't have a warrant, so they assert the right to invade your privacy by flying tiny cameras into the space and photographing everything. They promise not to use the evidence they find unless they get a warrant, but they now have evidence obtained in advance of prosecution should an after-the-fact reason become known.

Why would the police, having this power, not just prospectively photograph all aspects of everything all the time "just in case"?

An md5 hash is weaker than a photo because there are other things that could decode to the same hash, but for the most part what it will do is serve as a way of telling that nothing changed, and in fact will be a way of verifying that the image you're looking at now is "reliable" (to some degree) as a picture of what you had before. And so in effect, it's a way of (almost) getting a picture of what you had before--certainly it transforms a picture of what you have now into something that can be claimed to be a picture of what you had before. And so it's a way of reaching into the past and creating evidence at that time and, constructively, it amounts to the taking of evidence before-the-fact.

It's often hard for people to understand why that's bad, since it falls easiliy prey to the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care?" argument. But it depends on what you value about a free society. If you're comfortable with the idea of police searching your house any time they want just because they're not going to find anything, I guess there's no issue. But me, I don't even like my friends rummaging my house. I value the concept of privacy as an intrinsic thing.

Naturally we all want the "evil doers" brought to justice, and this case probably troubles most people, but the issue is that it sets a precedent that's usable in other cases, and you don't want that precedent to be that just because it was convenient to get one guy on one day, all of our rights suffer forever after. So I'm happy that it sounds like there was a conservative ruling on this. (Where I mean "conservative" in the traditional meaning of the word, not the neocon meaning.)

Refreshing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so refreshing to read slashdot and hear intelligent reasonable rational people who are concerned with the freedom and legitimacy of the American Republic. God Bless Slashdot and God bless America.

We're fighting this right here in St. Louis, MO

[King_TJ]

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/A5DA99A5DC85587B862574F0000EB107?OpenDocument

No/few warrants is conceivable

[BenEnglishAtHome]

"the judicial tradition of suppressing evidence entirely because it was produced without a proper warrant is absurd. The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there. Instead, fine the police for doing the wrong thing"

Here, I agree -- to a point. It doesn't change the fact that in the context of the system as it exists, the court's action is correct, though; today the remedy for illegal search is suppression of evidence.

But yes, I think holding law enforcement personally responsible when they violate the rights of the accused would be more just than penalizing the victim (and any potential future victims) by preventing a conviction when the accused really is guilty -- if such a system can be made to work.

I wish I could remember the author and book name but I can't so take this as anecdotal until someone comes up with references.

A while back, there was a book getting some attention on CSPAN and in the literary and legal press that posited warrants were not conceived as common things. A warrant, so the thinking went, would indemnify the police from damages if they searched an innocent party. If the police searched someone without first getting a warrant and that person turned out to be guilty, then the search was fine in a "no harm, no foul" sense. If the police did not get a warrant and searched someone innocent, then the person searched would take legal action and be directly awarded large penalties from the police.

The position of the book was that warrants were originally conceived to be rare things, only gotten when there was an edge case where the police reasonably suspected wrongdoing but weren't absolutely sure of their facts. Supposedly, if the police were absolutely sure, they should be free to go ahead and kick in doors. Generally, though, the police were assumed to be unwilling to do so in any but the most obvious cases because to do so incorrectly would bring major penalties down on their heads.

The book cited old English and colonial cases where police made mistakes and courts then ordered the police to directly pay damages to the former suspect.

Such a system could have worked back in the day. Nowadays, not so much. So much of what is illegal these days is invisible or not easily discernible that the need for warrants, even under the old criteria, is huge. Add to that the common practice of police not acting with integrity (I came of age in Houston, Texas in the 1970s. If you learned to deal with cops in that time and place, you'll never, ever, ever trust any cop to tell the truth about anything. You will forever assume that any evidence found by cops was planted. Period.), and the whole "Cops won't hurt innocents because they're afraid of the repercussions" notion simply falls apart.

I said all that to say this - I have some appreciation of the reasonableness of the attitude that if evidence of a crime is found, it doesn't really matter how it was obtained. On balance, I don't agree with that position but I do believe that it should not dismissed out of hand. It has some theoretical merit. It has no practical utility these days, but the theory isn't all crap.

BITTORRENT?

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE]

Couldn't this be a precident that affects anti-piracy taskforces, as Bittorrent uses Distributed Hash Tables, which are a form of MD5 Checking if I recollect correctly. So in order to catch someone seeding something illegal they have to get a warrant to even delve into the DHT stream?

Oblig

[winphreak]

"Oh won't someone please think of the children!" - Helen Lovejoy

Re:I don't think 4th amendment applies in this cas

[DavidTC]

That sort of law varies from state-to-state, with various time limits on it.

Incidentally, evicting someone from their apartment requires calling the police in many jurisdictions, even if they aren't residing there anymore. You have to fill out forms and the police have to formally turn the abandoned property over to you and whatnot. You can't just call it abandoned and randomly sell it. There are procedures you have to follow, like trying to contact the person.

It really sounds like this landlord was operating in violation of the law. I don't really know what's happening, but the story, as told, seems to be glossing over the legal aspects of this.

the way the police got the drive to begin

[FeatherBoa]

I don't see how the issue of exactly *how* the drive was searched by the police matters all that much. The thing that troubles me is the way they got their hands on the drive to begin with. It was given to the police by a third party. One that had an ax to grid against the accused.

Imagine if I want to crucify my tenant, what I do is go in, grab his computer, fill it full of bad stuff and then hand it to the police. You'd think the police would think twice about where the stuff is coming from and whether it is legitimate evidence in the first place. My take is that it is no more evidence against the accused than against the landlord or his accomplice.

a quote (not from the FA)

[space_hippy]

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
                H. L. Mencken

Almost...

[CarpetShark]

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"

Not quite. Actually, until they get due process, they ARE normal; they're called citizens.

each drive platter must be searched seperately

[Spazmania]

The same judge also said:

A hard drive is not analogous to an individual disk. Rather, a hard drive is comprised of many platters, or magnetic data storage units, mounted together. Each platter, as opposed to the hard drive in its entirety, is analogous to a single disk as discussed in Runyan.

Which is thoroughly asinine.

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.

Re:But you are the rabid mob!

[nahdude812]

I agree, cops who are found to have knowingly and intentionally violated the privacy of a suspect outside of due process deserve to be punished for such in exactly the same way as non-cops doing the same. I believe there's some sort of law about digital trespass which could be applied.

Cops tend to get a free ride when they screw up. To a certain extent, I think there's an occupational hazard there, and I think things should be a little more lenient because honest mistakes in the course of doing their job has greater consequences than the consequences of honest mistakes by ordinary citizens. At the same time though, their honest mistakes have greater consequences such that incorrectly accused innocent citizens can have their life completely ruined - lose their job, friends, wife, family, all because a cop made a mistake.

Where that balancing act lies exactly I'm not sure I'm qualified to say, but I think it would have a lot to do with a consideration of good faith on the part of the police officer. If he legitimately thought he was doing the right thing, consequences should be substantially mitigated (though repeat offenses such as through ineptitude should eventually carry consequences such as loss of status as a police officer).

Here's the problem with admitting the evidence even though it was illegally obtained. If you do this, then there might as well be no 4th amendment at all. Cops would just search whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. They get their wrist slapped, but get to carry away the evidence anyway. Admitting illegally obtained evidence is equivalent to removing all private citizen privacy, it just raises the cost of obtaining it slightly.

Yes, it's a real shame that a person who turns out to have possibly been guilty, but even this does not change for better or for worse the damage which was done to the children in the pornography.

Finally, the details of this case are not as clear-cut as you might like to believe. The computer was in the possession of two other individuals before it arrived to the Police. At least one or both of these individuals had motive for framing the defendant by planting the images on the laptop which was in their control. The chain of custody is broken on this evidence, and there's no sure way to know whether the evidence was planted or not. This is possibly why they didn't obtain a search warrant - because if I were a judge, I would have concluded that any incriminating evidence would not be trustworthy unless it was backed up by enough external supporting evidence (such as prints of the images in question in the defendants house) that the evidence gained from the computer was unnecessary anyway.

So let me be clear about this. Your argument is that the guy is now proven to be guilty, so that justifies the search the cops couldn't or didn't bother to get a warrant for. My argument is that maybe the reason they couldn't or didn't bother to get this warrant is because the evidence wasn't trustworthy anyway.

This is exactly the scenario that is the reason you can't let cops just violate a citizen's rights then still reap all of the benefits.

Another reason not to convict

[Locke2005]

No clear chain of custody for the evidence. Sell, Hipple, and the landlord all had access to Crist's computer; any one of them (and anybody else who had access to the apartment) could have placed the images on the hard drive. The landlord even had a motive for getting Crist in trouble -- not paying your rent tends to piss people off. That being said, if Hipple claimed he saw kitty porn on the drive, that should have been sufficient cause to get a search warrant -- the cops messed up by not following proper procedures.

hashing requires scanning the contents of all file

[OrangeTide]

Seems like a no-brainer. the process of generating the MD5/SHA/etc is going to require you to scan the contents of the files. Sounds pretty invasive to me. Maybe I don't see the significance of this ruling?

Downloaded some illegal porn =/= sexual predator

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of posts are talking about the defendant as if he is a proven sexual predator... I think that even if he downloaded child porn on purpose and enjoyed it that hardly proves that he's a predator. There's a world of difference between a man who's intention is to masturbate to some pictures and a man who's intention is to find someone to rape.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Humor

[phorm]

"maybe-underage girls" reminds me of an old joke I heard once.

A cop is driving his beat when he sees a car parked in a location commonly used by young couples for various forms of irresponsible behavior. He pulls up beside it, and walks up, and taps on the window.

Rather than finding the occupants engaged in anything untoward, he finds a man with a magazine and a young woman with a spool of yarn.

He asks the young man: "What are you two doing up here tonight."

The young man replies: "Well, I'm catching up on the financial times, and she's knitting a sweater."

The cop is a bit confused by this, but follows through with another standard question:

"And how old are the both of you."

The young man replies rather glibly: "Well, I'm 25, and in about 15 minutes from now she'll be 18"

I just got v&

[SafteyRazorBlade]

The dhs and local police showed up at my door, said a bad conversation was had with a minor.
I was perplexed, so I let them in, showed them my computer, out of terabytes of stuff they found an image, not a collection, AN _IMAGE_, i have no f**king clue where it came from. 4chan possibly......

So I signed the computer over, have heard nothing and am waiting to be cuffed at some point in the next day or so.

I will be leaving this country after time served, to fuck with being branded a witch (sexual preditor).

Even if they let ,me go and give my stuff back, I'm selling it all, and going to a third world country and building some massive data infrastructure.

FUCK AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, STUFF IT UP YOUR ASS, IT IS AN ILLUSION, NEED WE REHASH THE VOTES NOT BEING COUNTED

IF YOU HAVE SKILLS, LEAVE THE USA, THEY DO NOT VALUE YOU

Re:I just got v&

[Carbon016]

The police showed up at your door without a warrant and you voluntarily gave them your hard drive. Would help if more Americans exercised their legal rights.

Re:I just got v&

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have 7 dudes wearing body armor, fully weaponized, you don't argue, you play nice. They could have had a judge issue a warrant before they left the premises, as it is I am typing this on a 5 year old computer I assembled from parts in boxes.

You have no rights when the guys who come knocking have have you outnumbered and out gunned, considering I own none.

It's much easier to pose hypothetical situations than deal with reality, they will come for everyone sooner or later.

Babble on about European and American rights all you want, babble on about the courts, babble on about what rights you think you have, let reality teach you differently.

You defend the republic, I'm bailing on this bullshit as soon as possible and bringing tech to areas that have none.

Re:I just got v&

[Bigjeff5]

Actually, if you say "Do you have a warrant?", and they say "NO" or "Yes but it isn't here", guess who has more power than 7 armed police officers? That's right, you do. You can tell them to shove it, and get off your property. If you rent, you have legal right to that space and get to say the same thing. Even if they come up on you in the street you get to tell them to shove it, and if they follow you around you get to file harassment charges against them.

Even if cops pull you over for speeding, they aren't permitted to search your car for anything that isn't sitting out in plain sight for all to see, unless you let them or unless they have a warrant.

If they try to force you to do something against your will that they have legal right to, they can get in a crapload of trouble, but ONLY IF YOU ASSERT YOUR RIGHTS!

Maybe this country would be a better place if so many men weren't raised to be sissies, and instead had a spine and stood up for themselves and what is right.

Don't blame the cops because you're a wuss man, seriously. If you hand over your rights, you shouldn't complain. You frickin handed it to them, you moron, the couldn't have looked for anything without your help. So if you want to blame the cops for letting you give up your rights, go ahead, but it seems pretty idiotic to me.

Cheers.

in other news..

[nova.alpha]

pedobear approves this ruling

Really?

[Wooky_linuxer]

You sure? I'd like to see a proof of that. Speaking out of my ass really, but it doesn't seem logical to me. After all, MD5(b+pad2) still *is* an MD5 of an image file, call it c if you want. So MD5(a+ pad1) = MD5 (c). Perhaps I am missing something very obvious but I don't see how that can be true.

Re:Really?

[kvezach]

No, because you (or rather, the exploit algorithm) picks pad1 and pad2. To quote Wikipedia,

Because the current collision-finding techniques allow the preceding hash state to be specified arbitrarily, a collision can be found for any desired prefix; that is, for any given string of characters X, two colliding files can be determined which both begin with X.

Let's take that to the pedophile example. Sure, you can make two files, evil1 and evil2 that are both kiddy pr0n pictures (as long as it's the same pr0n picture) but with different padding, and thus get a collision; i.e, you can compute pad1 and pad2 so that evil1 = evil + pad1, evil2 = evil + pad2, MD5(evil1) = MD5(evil2). But this doesn't help you!

What you want is to find pad1 so that MD5(evil + pad1) = MD5(pbrush.exe) or something. That's a preimage attack, and that's not what the MD5 vulnerability is.

What you could use the collision attack to perform would be to have an executable file, call it detX, that either runs paintbrush or a virus, depending on what padding it has. Since you can't choose the padding yourself, you'd have to make 256 variants, the first being "if the last byte is 0 run paintbrush else run virus", the next being "if the last byte is 1 run paintbrush else run virus" and so on. Then you release the paintbrush variant dx1 = detX + pad1 to have it whitelisted (or whatnot). Then later, you release the virus variant, dx2, detX + pad2, which has the same MD5, and sneak through the defenses... if the defenses were that simple.

I'm not quite sure if the MD5 attack can be used to find collisions so that MD5(x + pad1) = MD5(y + pad2), where pad1 and pad2 are computed by the exploit. If so, you could use it to get someone to sign the hash of "I give you $5" plus padding, then show others he signed the hash of "I give you $5 million" plus some other padding. But again, I'm not sure, and it wouldn't help you sneak files through the radar anyway.

Boil a frog and he jumps out!

[Thing 1]

Hi, I know it's an oft-used analogy, but it's false...

Better

[zippthorne]

Not as good as this guy though.

The problem with overly numerous laws, as you mention, is actually separate from the problem of overly permissive policing policy, even though they are both exacerbated by the other.

Re:Better

[nine-times]

I don't agree that it's not as good as that guy's, because (a) we're talking about the same thing, and (b) I'm stressing the main purpose of the 4th amendment.

Because ultimately, I'm not complaining about "overly numerous laws" that mean you can't help but break the law. That's one kind of problem, but it's a different problem. The greater point is that, even if you haven't broken any laws, that won't keep the police from harassing/arresting you. Even if you've broken no laws, it's possible that police, allowed to search through your entire life long enough, could cherry pick enough evidence to make it appear that you had broken very serious laws. They could put together enough circumstantial evidence for an arrest, and they may even be able to find enough for a conviction, even if you assume they won't bother to plant evidence.

That's why police can't just search you without a warrant. That's why you have the right to remain silent. Like I said, police aren't allowed target people for investigation, looking for crimes that you can use as justification for punishing them. These are basic protections formulated in the Bill of Rights to protect citizens against the abuse of power.

Re:

[clint999]

Speaking of frothing.... This wasn't an "active choice" to free a child molester it was a judge using common sense and realizing that this was a search without a proper warrant and throwing it out just as he would\should if an officer kicked your door down without a proper warrant.Troll indeed!

MD5 Collision

[Anonymous Coward]

What about MD5 collisions? I know that the probability is really, really small. But can you really prove something with a match between two md5 hash ?

You describe compulsory dishonesty

[tjstork]

My argument is that maybe the reason they couldn't or didn't bother to get this warrant is because the evidence wasn't trustworthy anyway.

Well, no.. because, you could always throw out the evidence because the chain of custody wasn't there. A broken chain of custody of evidence is independent of the warrant issue. What's going on here is that the defendent abused the 4th amendment to avoid the argument of chain of custody. Instead the police are going to the jury compelled to -lie- about the situation, and the truth is, there -is- evidence with a dubious chain of custody. Justice is about truth and your position of the 4th amendment compels dishonesty.

Re:You describe compulsory dishonesty

[nahdude812]

Who compelled anyone to lie? I'm not seeing that connection. They are only incited to lie if they want to give an inaccurate depiction of the facts, and that's completely irrelevant to whether or not they searched his goods without a right.

My position on the 4th amendment is that it stands on its own merits, and is legally inviolable.

My question to you is, if the evidence was viable, why didn't the police get a search warrant? Broken custody and viability of evidence are considerations in the issuing of a search warrant. You can have reasonable cause to search, but if the thing you're searching for offers no value to the case at hand, the search won't be granted. Even when searches are granted, they are granted with restrictions on what may be searched, and what evidence may be obtained. If the search warrant says "house", and there is a detached garage that is not part of the house, then it's off limits. Judges do this because they are limiting the search as much as possible to things which will be relevant to the case.

We're wandering far astray here though. The issue I'm responding to you on (and I waited until today because I know you lost a lot of points on your other comments in this thread, but I'm genuinely interested in debating this with you without it necessarily costing you so much karma), is whether 1) the discovery of evidence justifies an illegal search, and 2) illegally obtained evidence should be considered anyway.

As to #1, I say: never unless there is an immediate threat to someone's safety, and then only as far as is necessary to mitigate the immediate circumstances.

As to #2, I say: again, never. The 4th amendment exists to protect innocent citizens from abuse by authority figures. These authority figures have been granted extraordinary powers, and as with all power, that will corrupt some people ("power corrupts," etc). The 4th amendment acknowledges that there are times when search and seizure are sometimes reasonable, such as when there is sufficient evidence of a crime to merit further investigation. The warrant system has been created to facilitate establishing reasonability. When someone is suspected of having committed a crime, there is a clear procedure in place for the police or other authority figures to be granted access to this "reasonable" clause. It's done with judicial oversight because that is the check and balance which protects against (though arguably doesn't completely eliminate) abuse.

If the search is conducted without this check/balance, a citizen's 4th amendment right has been violated. Whether or not that citizen turns out to have actually been guilty of the crime which was being investigated is not material to whether or not the search was legal, because it presupposes that you know whether the search will turn up convincing evidence. If you accept illegally obtained evidence, then there is no motivation to ever obtain evidence legally. Then finally if there's no reason to ever obtain evidence legally, police officers or others with similar authority would in effect have free reign to search anyone or anything at any time; only claiming that it was part of an investigation. You've stripped the reasonability requirement from searches.

I think you may be suggesting that the motivation to legally obtain evidence should be solely in the form of punishing abuses. The downside to that is that either you make the punishment sufficiently unsevere that sometimes LEO's accept that as simply the cost of performing an illegal search. Or you make it sufficiently high that no LEOs would ever make the decision that the cost was worth it - but in that case you will end up destroying the lives or careers of LEO's who made an honest mistake while acting in good faith. Anywhere in between those two ends, you end up with one consequence or the other becoming more common as you move across the continuum.

Re:You describe compulsory dishonesty

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. - I threw the one mod point I had left your way in another thread (because of course I can't use them on this thread, having commented in it). I think you were not well treated on the whole in terms of moderation on this topic, because your comments were not incendiary, and you reasonably defended your stance - even if it wasn't the popular one amongst this crowd. Hopefully that'll offset the damage done here a little bit.

Re:You describe compulsory dishonesty

[Anonymous Coward]

They most certainly were deserving of the downmodding he got. Not because of his opinions, but because he repeatedly and deliberately lied about the positions of everyone disagreeing with him. Plus the "liberal = traitor" garbage, which is objectively trollish regardless of where you're coming from politically.