United States v. Reddick

At issue in this appeal was whether and when the use of hash values by law enforcement is consistent with the Fourth Amendment. The Fifth Circuit held that, under the private search doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated where the government does not conduct the search itself, but only receives and utilizes information uncovered by a search conducted by a private party.The court affirmed the district court's denial of defendant's motion to suppress child pornography found in his home. In this case, a private company determined that the hash values of files uploaded by defendant corresponded to the hash values of known child pornography images and passed this information on to law enforcement. The court held that this circumstance qualified as a private search for Fourth Amendment purposes because the government's subsequent law enforcement actions in reviewing the images did not effect an intrusion on defendant's privacy that he did not already experience as a result of the private search. View "United States v. Reddick" on Justia Law