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."

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Re:"Available for public download" - AT&T and

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL, but there comes a point when every law reduces to some arbitrary judgment call. If I leave a box of donuts open in my closed (but not locked) office, I might expect coworkers not to eat any. On the other hand, leaving the same box of donuts in the break room makes that assumption unreasonable. In both cases, there is absolutely nothing stopping coworkers from getting to the donuts; society has decided that putting the donuts behind a door makes them my property, whereas putting them in the break room makes them everybody's.

Making something available via a Web server with no authentication is a bit like leaving the donuts in my office. Unless you checked, you wouldn't know they were there; I wasn't advertising their whereabouts. And even if you somehow knew they were there, the fact that I'm not advertising means that the social contract prohibits you from going and getting them without asking. The P2P network is a lot more like the break room - maybe you didn't know the social convention, but that doesn't suddenly mean you're entitled to complain about it. Learn from your mistake and move on.

Re:"Available for public download" - AT&T and

[Zordak]

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.

Re:"Available for public download" - AT&T and

[Anonymous Coward]

Intention seems to be the definitive factor for you, so riddle me this: did the kiddie-diddlers intend to expose incriminating evidence? If not, then this is a discrepancy in the application of the law -- not entirely unexpected, but still worth pointing out.

Re: There is still an "out"

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been acquittals for CP, but those are cases that never should have been in court in the first place. Kelly Hoose is the big one that comes to mind (I think from 2006) because he spent four years fighting in federal court on CP possession charges over pictures that were watermarked by a legit site and had a model that was well over 21 in them. They used something called the "Tanner scale" to claim that the girl in the photo was probably 14 or so (exact number escapes me) and he was going to burn. He flew in the girl in the photos to testify that she was in her 20s and that's the only thing that stopped the prosecution in their tracks. Even though they knew it was legal, they tried to bury him for having it. That's the only type of acquittals I've heard of thus far. Everyone else seems to be convicted or plead out.

AKA Two (or more) Tiered Justice System

[FriendlyLurker]

America has a very visible easily confirmed two tiered justice system [startpage.com].