201–210 of 316 posts
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.
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…
> Party A discovers very high probability evidence that Party B is committing crimes within the property ... This isn't accurate: the hashes were purposefully compared to a specific list. They didn't happen to notice it, they looked specifically for it. And of course, what happens when it's a different list?
The difference I do see, however, is that many places do have laws that restrict this sort of surveillance. If we're talking about an apartment building, a landlord can put cameras in common areas of the building, but cannot put cameras inside individual units. And with the exception of emergencies, many places require that a landlord give tenants some amount of notice before entering their unit.
So if Google is checking user images against known CSAM image hashes, are those user images sitting out in the common areas, or are they in an individual tenant's unit? I think it should be obvious that it's the latter, not the former.
Maybe this is more like a company that rents out storage units. Do storage companies generally have the right to enter their customers' storage units whenever they want, without notice or notification? Many storage companies allow customers to put their own locks on their units, so even if they have the right to enter whenever they want, regularly, in practice they certainly do not.
But like all analogies, this one is going to have flaws. Even if we can't match it up with a real-world example, maybe there's still no inconsistency or problem here. Google's ToS says they can and will do this sort of scanning, users agree to it, and there's no law saying Google can't do that sort of thing. Google itself has no obligation to preserve users' 4th Amendment rights; they passed along evidence to the police. I do think the police should be required to obtain a warrant before gaining access to the underlying data; the judge agrees on this, but the police get away with it in the original case due to the bullshit "good faith exception".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I’m paranoid like I said, but this case it seems like the hash of a file on google’s remote storage flagged as potential match that was used as justification to request a warrant. That seems common sense and did not involve employees snooping pre-warrant. The Apple CSAM hash detection process, that the launch was rolled back, concerned me namely because it was run on-device with no opt out. If this is running on…
I think the better option is a system where the cloud provider cannot decrypt the files, and they’re not obligated to lift a finger to help the police because they have no knowledge of the content at all
I would personally not knowingly use a cloud provider to commit a crime. That is a fairly naive take to assume because your browser is https that data at rest and in process isn’t somehow observable.
And I see where you’re coming from but I am afraid that position severely overestimates the will of US people to trade freedom/privacy for security and the legislature to hold citizens’ privacy in such high regard.
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This is an excellent example, I think I get it now and I'm fully on-board. Thanks. I could easily see an AirBNB owner calling the cops if they saw, for instance, child abuse happening on their property.
Ok. But that would also be invasion of privacy. If the property you rented out was being used for trafficking and you don’t want to be involved with trafficking, then the terms would have to first explicitly set what is not allowed. Then it would also have to explicitly mention what measures are taken to enforce it and what punishments are imposed for violations. It should also mention steps that are taken for compli…
I don't believe that's the case. You don't need to state that illegal activities are not allowed; that's the default.
> Then it would also have to explicitly mention what measures are taken to enforce it
When Airbnb used to allow cameras indoors, they did -- after some backlash -- require hosts to disclose the presence of the cameras.
> ... and what punishments are imposed for violations.
No, I don't think that is or should be necessary. If you do illegal things, the possible punishments don't need to be enumerated by the person who reports you to the police.
Put another way: if I'm hosting someone on Airbnb in the case where I'm living in the same property, and I walk into the kitchen to see my Airbnb guest dealing drugs, I am well within my rights to call the police, without having ever said anything up-front to my guest about whether or not that's acceptable behavior, or what the consequences might be. Having the drug deal instead caught on camera is no different, though I would agree that the presence of the cameras should have to be disclosed beforehand.
In Google's case, the "camera" (aka CSAM scanning) appears to have been disclosed beforehand.
>please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. (@dang) On topic, I like this quote from the first page of the opinion: >A “hash” or “hash value” is “(usually) a short string of characters generated from a much larger string of data (say, an electronic image) using an algorithm—and calculated in a way that makes it highly unlikely another set of data will produce the same valu…
What's so weird about this? CS literature is not legally binding in any way. Of course a judge would rather quote a previous ruling by fellow judge than a textbook, Wikipedia, or similar sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I’m paranoid like I said, but this case it seems like the hash of a file on google’s remote storage flagged as potential match that was used as justification to request a warrant. That seems common sense and did not involve employees snooping pre-warrant. The Apple CSAM hash detection process, that the launch was rolled back, concerned me namely because it was run on-device with no opt out. If this is running on…
> You need to ensure you are not aiding or harboring actually harmful illegal material. Is this actually true, legally speaking?
I think if you knowingly provided a platform to distribute SA/CP/CSAM and the feds become involved you will be righteously fucked.
Reddit clamped down on the creepy *bait subreddits years ago. Maybe it was self-preservation on the business side or maybe it was forward looking about legal issues.
I’m not a lawyer I was just mentioning things that I would follow for ethics morals and my sense of self preservation.
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I don't agree that it would be proof beyond reasonable doubt, especially because neither google nor law enforcement can produce the original image that got tagged.
By original do you mean the one in the database or the one on the device? If the device spit out the same SHA3, then either it had the exact same image, or the SHA3 was planted somehow. The idea that it's actually a different file is not a reasonable doubt. It's too unlikely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By original do you mean the one in the database or the one on the device? If the device spit out the same SHA3, then either it had the exact same image, or the SHA3 was planted somehow. The idea that it's actually a different file is not a reasonable doubt. It's too unlikely.
By the original, I mean the image that was used to produce the initial hash, which Google (rightly) claimed to be CSAM. Without some proof that an illicit image that has the same hash exists, I wouldn't accept a claim based on hash alone.
"That, however, does not mean that Maher is entitled to relief from conviction. As the district court correctly ruled in the alternative, 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 no warrant was required." "Defendant [..] stands convicted following a guilty plea…
Constitutional rights did not win enough, it should be that violating constitutional rights means the accused goes free, period, end of story
That's a ridiculous desire. In that world, if I delete your comment, and you kill me in retaliation, you should be let free if you argue that my deleting your comment infringed your right to free speech?
Well let's look at how this actually played out. - Defendant was in fact sending CP through his gmail. - gmail correctly detects and flags it based on hash value - Google sends message to NCMEC based on hash value - NCMEC sends it to police based on hash value Now police are facing the obvious question, is this actually CP? They open the image, determine it is, then get a warrant to search his gmail account, and (lat…
> Recall that the standard for issuance of a warrant is 'probable cause', not 'mathematically proven cause'. Hash collisions are a possibility, but a sufficiently unlikely one that it doesn't matter. Probable cause means 'a fair probability' based on independent evidence of some kind - testimony, observation, forensic results or so. Even a shitty hash function that's only 90% reliable is going to meet that threshold.…
what if the reality is, that 99.9% of the matches are actually false positives
Don't you think that if Google were deluging the cops with false positive reports that turned out to be perfectly innocuous 999 times out of 1000, that police would call them up and say 'why are you wasting our time with this?' Or that defense lawyers wouldn't be raising hell if there were large numbers of clients being investigated over nothing? And how would running it through a judge first improve that process?
What about intentional matches, like someone intentionally creating some random SFW meme image [...]
OK, but what is the probability of that happening? And if such images are being mailed in bulk, what would be the purpose other than to provide cover for CSAM traders? The tactic would only be viable for as long as it takes a platform operator to change up their hashing algorithm. And again, how would the extra legal step of consulting a judge alleviate this?
should police really be checking all those emails, photos, etc., without warrants?
But that's not happening. As I pointed out, police examined the submitted image evidence to determine of it was CP (it was). Then they got a warrant to search the gmail account, and following that another warrant to search his home. The didn't investigate the criminal first, the investigated an image file submitted to them to determine whether it was evidence of a crime.
And yet again, how would bouncing this off a judge improve the process? The judge will just look at the report submitted to the police and a standard police letter saying 'reports of this kind are reliable in our experience' and then tell the police yes, go ahead and look.