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Judge: No Privacy Expectations For Data On P2P Networks
An anonymous reader writes "A federal judge in Vermont has denied a motion to suppress evidence filed by three defendants in a child porn case. The three had alleged their Fourth Amendment rights were violated when police used an automated P2P query-response tool to gather information from their computers. That information subsequently led to their arrest and indictments. The judge held (PDF) that the defendants had either inadvertently, or otherwise, made the information available for public download on a P2P network and therefore couldn't assert any privacy claims over the data."
And no, I'm not defending child porn users. Well, I guess I sort of am. But not... Darn it, you guys know what I mean.
Kiddie porn pirates are not the problem, the problem are all the people involved in the production. If you believe the MAFIAA's rhetoric the pirates are the solution since they are destroying the jobs of all the hard-working people in the kiddie porn industry.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
my privates have been on the internet.
Especially on a P2P network like Gnutella where you can do search by keywords and then directly view what people have on their computers. It's like hanging a poster in your living room of a child being abused and someone walking by seeing it. They made the materials available for the public to see. I hope more people who are into sick stuff like that make the mistake of having the files publically visible. Especially p2p users since given the nature of p2p they can also be slapped with a distribution charge which will add years to their sentence.
Because that WAS the intention of the owner: to share their data with random, unknown 3rd parties. That's pretty much the entire purpose of P2P networks.
Yeah, I don't see what the issue is. They were sharing these files, or left them in folders their P2P software would automatically share.
The article shows the police went ot of their way to deliberately not download the files, presumably for 4th Amendment search reasons, though why even that would be a problem I don't know. They were deliberately and knowingly sharing those files.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I was gonna say the same but couldnt come up with a way of saying "think of the children and download kiddie porn" without it coming across the wrong way.
I think the take-away here is that the MPAA and RIAA are steadfast in their support of kiddie porn producers.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
False analogy. This case is not controlled by copyright law. This is a fourth amendment case. Those two bodies of law have almost nothing to do with each other substantively (yes, there may be fourth amendment implications to how police investigate copyrights, but that's separate from the substance of copyright law). The question here is whether the defendants had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data, not what they subjectively hoped people would do with it. If you grow weed in an open field, with a sign that says, "Cops don't look!" it doesn't matter that you subjectively intended to exclude police from seeing what was in the field. Your expectation of privacy, if you had any, was not reasonable.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
In other news, the Police also do not need a warrant to attend your public meeting. They don't need a warrant to read the book you published on the rack of the local bookstore. They don't need a warrant to browse around your open store in the local strip mall.
And they don't need a warrant to download data you offered up to any member of the public and browse through it to find incriminating evidence.