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:that's basically what they were doing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:that's basically what they were doing. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
search = search (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:that's basically what they were doing. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Yes. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's a terrible argument (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Bad way to search for kiddie porn (Score:4, Insightful)
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:That's a terrible argument (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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:I love how... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:search = search (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's a terrible argument (Score:5, Insightful)
"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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:That's a terrible argument (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>"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:It doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
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's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>>>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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:that's basically what they were doing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:That's a terrible argument (Score:3, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's a terrible argument (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 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.
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 [wikiquote.org]. 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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I don't think 4th amendment applies in this cas (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's good to see. (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, just terrorism and border security.
Cheers
Re:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:1, Insightful)
"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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:that's basically what they were doing. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 a terrible argument (Score:2, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:1, Insightful)
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:That's a terrible argument (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Hate to rain on your parade... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's a terrible argument (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it looks like a pretty good search technique.
No, it's a pretty shitty one. Here's why:
Re:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's good to see. (Score:3, Insightful)
...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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:2, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:That's a terrible argument (Score:3, Insightful)
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:It's good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's good to see. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.