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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]

#81

Post by bluGill »

glitcher wrote: post #42
superkuh wrote: post #3

It's crazy that the most dangerous people one regularly encounters can do anything they want as long as they believe they can do it. The good faith exemption has to be one of the most fascist laws on the books today. > "the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule supports denial of Maher’s suppression motion because, at the time authorities opened his uploaded file, they had a good faith basis to believe that n…

And specifically with respect to the law, breaking a law and claiming you didn't know you did anything wrong as an individual is not considered a valid defense in our justice system. This same type of standard should apply even more to trained law enforcement, not less, otherwise it becomes a double standard.

No this is breaking the law by saying this looked like one of the situations where I already know the law doesn't apply. If Google had looked at the actual image and said it was child porn instead of just saying it was similar to some image that is child porn this would be 100% legal as the courts have already said. That difference is subtle enough that I can see how someone would get it wrong (and in fact I would expect other courts to rule differently)

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

#82

Post by aiforecastthway »

DragonStrength wrote: post #70
aiforecastthway wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. This is a case where the physical analogy leads us to (imo) the correct conclusion: compelling major property management companies to perform regular searches of their tenant's properties, and then to report any findings to the police, is hopefully something that most judges understand to be a clear violation of the fourth amendment.

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

#83

Post by fluoridation »

gcbirzan wrote: post #73
jjk7 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. How else would you prevent framing someone?

So you're saying that I craft a file that has the same hash as a CSAM one, I give it to you, you upload it to google, but it also happens to be CSAM, and I've somehow framed you? My point is that a hash (granted, I'm assuming that we're talking about a cryptographic hash function, which is not clear) is much closer to "This is the file" than someone actually looking at it, and that it's definitely more proof of them…

I don't understand. If you contend that it's even better evidence than actually having the file and looking at it, how is not reasonable to then need a judge to issue a warrant to look at it? Are you saying it would be more reasonable to skip that part and go directly to arrest?

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

#84

Post by IronWolve »

Was using those md5 sums on images for flagging images 20 years ago for the government, occasional false positives, but the safety team would review those, not operations. My only role was to burn the users account to a dvd (via a script) and have the police officer pick up the dvd, we never touched the disk, and only burned the disk with a warrant. (we never saw/touched the users data...)

Figured this common industry standard for chain of custody for evidence. Same with police videos, they are uploaded to the courts digital evidence repository, and everyone who looks at the evidence is logged.

Seems like a standard legal process was followed.

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

#85

Post by int_19h »

jjk7 wrote: post #69
int_19h wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Icky things were historically made illegal all the time, but most of those historical examples have not fared well in retrospect. Modern justice systems are generally predicated on some quantifiable harm for good reasons.

Given the extremely harsh penalties at play, I am not at all comfortable about punishing someone with a multi-year prison sentence for possession of a drawn or computer generated image. What exactly is the point, other than people getting off from making someone suffer for reasons they consider morally justifiable?

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

#86

Post by bluGill »

Onavo wrote: post #22
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hash can be arbitrary, the only requirement is it is a deterministic one-way function.

And it should be mostly bijective under most conditions. (This is obviously impossible in practice but hashes with common collisions shouldn't be allowed as legal evidence). Also neural/visual hashes like those used by big tech makes things tricky.

The hash in question has many collisions. It it probably enough to get a warrant put it on a warrant, but it may not be enough to get a warrant without some other evidence. (it can be enough evidence to look for other public signs of evidence, or perhaps because there are a number of images that match different hashes)

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

#87

Post by bluGill »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #49
curiousllama wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what is false positive rate of a hash match? If the FPR is comparable to asking a human "are these the same image?", then it would seem to be equivalent to a visual search. I wonder if (or why) human verification is actually necessary here.

I doubt sha1 hashes are used for this. Those image hashes should match files regardless of orientation, cropping, resizing, re-compression, color correction etc. The collision could be far more frequent with these hashes.

The hash should ideally match even if you use photoshop to cut the one person out of the picture and put that person into a different photo. I'm not sure if that is possible, but that is what we want.

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

#88

Post by water-data-dude »

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 ).

That makes sense - if they were using a cryptographic hash then people could get around it by making tiny changes to the file. I’ve used some reverse image search tools, which use perceptual hashing under the hood, to find the original source for art that gets shared without attribution (saucenao pretty solid). They’re good, but they definitely have false positives.

Now you’ve got me interested in what’s going on under the hood, lol. It’s probably like any other statistical model: you can decrease your false negatives (images people have cropped or added watermarks/text to), but at the cost of increased false positives.

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

#89

Post by p0w3n3d »

The problem with the internet nowadays is that a few big players are making up their own law. Very often it is against local laws, but nobody can fight with it. For example someone created some content but other person uploaded it and got better scores which rendered the original poster blocked. Another example: children were playing a violin concert and the audio got removed due to alleged copyright violation. No possibility to appeal, nobody sane would go to court. It just goes this way...

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

#90

Post by wrs »

gcbirzan wrote: post #73
jjk7 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. How else would you prevent framing someone?

So you're saying that I craft a file that has the same hash as a CSAM one, I give it to you, you upload it to google, but it also happens to be CSAM, and I've somehow framed you? My point is that a hash (granted, I'm assuming that we're talking about a cryptographic hash function, which is not clear) is much closer to "This is the file" than someone actually looking at it, and that it's definitely more proof of them…

These are perceptual hashes designed on purpose to be a little vague and broad so they catch transformed images. Not cryptographic hashes.
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