Defendant’s computer was on the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. The police went in and found 1571 files for sharing and did a software driven search and found child porn on some of them. A week later they went back and found more. There was probable cause for the search warrant for the computer and for associated computer storage devices that might also be found in the same house. August from the entry into the computer to January for the SW wasn’t stale. United States v. Hawkins, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 175562 (W.D. Pa. December 19, 2014).<\/p>\n
One who leaves his computer on with a file sharing program running has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the files that can be obtained. Here, police were running a training program showing other officers how it was done and, in the class exercise, they went into defendant\u2019s open computer and, running a program looking for the hash values of known child pornography, found several images on defendant\u2019s computer. That led to a search warrant. State v. Welch<\/a>, 2014 Ariz. App. LEXIS 256 (November 14, 2014). [Note: One analogy is putting a sign on your house saying: \u201ccome in and take whatever you want; leave something if you can.\u201d How can anyone have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such circumstances?]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Defendant’s computer was on the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. The police went in and found 1571 files for sharing and did a software driven search and found child porn on some of them. A week later they went back and found … Continue reading