EFF: The Playpen Story: Some Fourth Amendment Basics and Law Enforcement Hacking

EFF: The Playpen Story: Some Fourth Amendment Basics and Law Enforcement Hacking by Mark Rumold:

(This is part of a series of blog posts about the Playpen cases. For more background, see our earlier blog post and our FAQ.)

It’s an old legal adage: bad facts make bad law. And the bad facts present in the Playpen prosecutions—the alleged possession and distribution of child porn, coupled with technology unfamiliar to many judges—have resulted in a number of troubling decisions concerning the Fourth Amendment’s protections in the digital age.

As we discussed in our previous post, courts have struggled to apply traditional rules limiting government searches—specifically, the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution’s primary protection against governmental invasions of privacy—to the technology at issue in this case, in some cases finding that the Fourth Amendment offers no protection from government hacking at all. That’s a serious problem.