US District Court Says Calculating a Hash Value = Search 623
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.
Re:It's good to see. (Score:5, Funny)
RE It's good to see (Score:4, Funny)
Re:RE It's good to see (Score:3, Funny)
Re:that's basically what they were doing. (Score:3, Funny)
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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:4, Funny)
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 ;)
Humor (Score:2, Funny)
"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"
Re:It's good to see. (Score:4, Funny)
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?