Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Court Rules Computer Hashes are Searches

No this isn't a court screwing up the distinction between two software concepts. This is about using software hashes to conduct a legal search that would need a warrant.

The Volokh Conspiracy writes District Court Holds that Running Hash Values on Computer Is A Search. It goes into details of how the search process happened. Agents made hashes of all the files and then compared them to hashes of known child porn and found a match. The argument is, since they didn't look at the files it wasn't a search.

It's an interesting case but it seems rather simple to me. First off, to create a hash they (or rather software) had to read the file. But really I think this is missing forest for the trees. They went through a process, before the process they didn't know what was on the computer, after the process they knew something about what was on the computer. That's a search.

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