Monday November 4
Paper 2
Terms of Service do not eliminate Fourth Amendment rights
Orin Kerr, one of the leading US attorneys on Fourth Amendment issues, has argued for this position for some time. The Second Circuit has just backed him up:
Ryan Maher uploaded an image to Google that was allegedly a child-pornography image. Google's Terms of Service state that they "may" report illegal content.
Google has a routine procedure for running a special hash on the image, which matched an entry in a catalog provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They then at some point contacted the police. Neither Google nor NCMEC actually looked at the file, though.
We conclude that neither the private search doctrine relied on by the district court nor the Google Terms of Service agreement cited by the government authorized the police to open the Maher file and to conduct such a visual examination of its contents without a warrant.
Though the court did say that Google's discovery would likely lead to probable cause for obtaining a warrant, and that Maher's conviction remains under the "good faith" exception to suppressing evidence obtained illegally.
Why do big corporations tolerate "sucks sites"? Because of what happened to McDonalds in the McLibel case
Threat Speech
Licra v Yahoo
Source Code as speech