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Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

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Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#61

Post by int_19h »

rmbyrro wrote: post #8
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #4

The Fourth Amendment didn't help here, unfortunately. Or, perhaps fortunately. Still, 25 years for possessing kiddie porn, damn.

The harshness of sentence is not for the action of keeping the photos in itself, but the individual suffering and social damage caused by the actions that he incentivizes when he consumes such content.

Consumption per se does not incentivize it, though; procurement does. It's not unreasonable to causally connect one to the other, but I still think that it needs to be done explicitly. Strict liability for possession in particular is nonsense.

There's also an interesting question wrt simulated (drawn, rendered etc) CSAM, especially now that AI image generators can produce it in bulk. There's no individual suffering nor social damage involved in that at any point, yet it's equally illegal in most jurisdictions, and the penalties aren't any lighter. I've yet to see any sensible arguments in favor of this arrangement - it appears to be purely a "crime against nature" kind of moral panic over the extreme ickiness of the act as opposed to any actual harm caused by it.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#62

Post by gcbirzan »

uniformlyrandom wrote: post #12

> Google’s hash match may well have established probable cause for a warrant to allow police to conduct a visual examination of the Maher file. Very reasonable. Google can flag accounts as CP, but then a judge still needs to issue a warrant for the police to actually go and look at the file. Good job court. Extra points for reasoning about hash values.

Is it reasonable? Even if the hash was md5, given valid image files, the chances of it being an accidental collision are way lower than the chance of any other evidence given to a judge was false or misinterpreted.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#63

Post by jjk7 »

gcbirzan wrote: post #62
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #12

> Google’s hash match may well have established probable cause for a warrant to allow police to conduct a visual examination of the Maher file. Very reasonable. Google can flag accounts as CP, but then a judge still needs to issue a warrant for the police to actually go and look at the file. Good job court. Extra points for reasoning about hash values.

Is it reasonable? Even if the hash was md5, given valid image files, the chances of it being an accidental collision are way lower than the chance of any other evidence given to a judge was false or misinterpreted.

Yes. How else would you prevent framing someone?

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#64

Post by jjk7 »

kulahan wrote: post #21
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #12

> Google’s hash match may well have established probable cause for a warrant to allow police to conduct a visual examination of the Maher file. Very reasonable. Google can flag accounts as CP, but then a judge still needs to issue a warrant for the police to actually go and look at the file. Good job court. Extra points for reasoning about hash values.

I'm trying to imagine a more "real-world" example of this to see how I feel about it. I dislike that there is yet another loophole to gain access to peoples' data for legal reasons, but this does feel like a reasonable approach and a valid goal to pursue. I guess it's like if someone noticed you had a case shaped exactly like a machine gun, told the police, and they went to check if it was registered or not? I suppos…

It's like a digital 'smell'; Google is a drug sniffing dog.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#65

Post by thrwaway1985882 »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #39
gorjusborg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of curiosity, what is false positive rate of a hash match? No way to know without knowledge of the 'proprietary hashing technology'. Theoretically though, a hash can have infinitely many inputs that produce the same output. Mismatching hash values from the same hashing algorithm can prove mismatching inputs, but matching hash values don't ensure matching inputs. > I wonder if (or why) human verification is actu…

I'd say the focus on hashing is a bit of a red herring. Most anyone would agree that the hash matching should probably form probable cause for a warrant, allowing a judge to sign off on the police searching (i.e., viewing) the image. So, if it's a collision, the cops get a warrant and open up your linux ISO or cat meme, and it's all good. Probably the ideal case is that they get a warrant to search the specific image…

I think it'll prove far more likely that the government creates incentives to lead Google/other providers to fully do the search on their behalf.

The entire appeal seems to hinge on the fact that Google didn't actually view the image before passing it to NCMEC. Had Google policy been that all perceptual hash hits were reviewed by employees first, this would've likely been a one page denial.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#66

Post by bluGill »

crooked-v wrote: post #46
naet wrote: post #34

It seems like a large part of the ruling hinges on the fact that Google matched the image hash to a hash of a known child pornography image, but didn't require an employee to actually look at that image before reporting it to the police. If they had visually confirmed it was the image they suspected it was based on the hash then no warrant would have been required, but the judge reads that the image hash match is not…

The hashes involved in stuff like this, as with copyright auto-matching, are perceptual hashes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing ), not cryptographic hashes. False matches are common enough that perceptual hashing attacks are already a thing in use to manipulate search engine results (see the example in random paper on the subject https://gangw.cs.illinois.edu/PHashing.pdf ).

It seems like that is very relevant information that was not considered by the court. If this was a cryptographic hash I would say with high confidence that this is the same image and so Google examined it - there is a small chance that some unrelated file (which might not even be a picture) matches but odds are the universe will end before that happens and so the courts can consider it the same image for search purposes. However because there are many false positive cases there is reasonable odds that the image is legal and so a higher standard for search is needed - a warrant.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#67

Post by TZubiri »

mcosta wrote: post #51
henryfjordan wrote: post #2

The judge doesn't really understand a hash well. They say things like "Google assigned a hash" which is not true, Google calculated the hash. Also I'm surprised the 3rd-party doctrine doesn't apply. There's the "private search doctrine" mentioned but generally you don't have an expectation of privacy for things you share with Google

Does a lab assigns a DNA to you or does it calculate? Does two different labs DNA analysis are exactly equal?

Remember that you can use multiple different algorithms to calculate a hash.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#68

Post by int_19h »

worik wrote: post #58
int_19h wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pornography is any multimedia content intended for (someone's) sexual arousal. CSAM is obviously a subset of that.

That is out of date The language has changed as we (in civilised countries) stop punishing sex work "porn" is different from CASM In the bad old days pornographers were treated the same as sadists

The language is defined by how people actually use it, not by how a handful of activists try to prescribe its use. Ask any random person on the street, and most of them have no idea what CSAM is, but they know full well what "child porn" is. Dictionaries, encyclopedias etc also reflect this common sense usage.

The justification for this attempt to change the definition doesn't make any sense, either. Just because some porn is child porn, which is bad, doesn't in any way imply that all porn is bad. In fact, I would posit that making this argument in the first place is detrimental to sex-positive outlook on porn.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#69

Post by jjk7 »

int_19h wrote: post #61
rmbyrro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harshness of sentence is not for the action of keeping the photos in itself, but the individual suffering and social damage caused by the actions that he incentivizes when he consumes such content.

Consumption per se does not incentivize it, though; procurement does. It's not unreasonable to causally connect one to the other, but I still think that it needs to be done explicitly. Strict liability for possession in particular is nonsense. There's also an interesting question wrt simulated (drawn, rendered etc) CSAM, especially now that AI image generators can produce it in bulk. There's no individual suffering n…

[flagged]

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#70

Post by DragonStrength »

aiforecastthway wrote: post #55
kulahan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to imagine a more "real-world" example of this to see how I feel about it. I dislike that there is yet another loophole to gain access to peoples' data for legal reasons, but this does feel like a reasonable approach and a valid goal to pursue. I guess it's like if someone noticed you had a case shaped exactly like a machine gun, told the police, and they went to check if it was registered or not? I suppos…

The main factual components are as follows: Party A has rented out property to Party B. Party A performs surveillance on or around the property with Party B's knowledge and consent. Party A discovers very high probability evidence that Party B is committing crimes within the property, and then informs the police of their findings. Police obtain a warrant, using Party A's statements as evidence. The closest "real worl…

The issue of course being the government then pressuring or requiring these companies to look for some sort of content as part of routine operations.
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