PA Court Says Calculating a Hash Value = Search
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 that 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 U.S. 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."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/O2xPZtdQmrA/article.pl