Henry Franklin Reddick v. United States
FourthAmendment CriminalProcedure Privacy Jurisdiction
Does a police officer violate the Fourth Amendment by opening a digital file and viewing an image in it without a warrant to confirm a private company's statement that the image is child pornography
QUESTION PRESENTED I. Does a police officer violate the Fourth Amendment by opening a digital file and viewing an image in it without a warrant to confirm a private company’s statement that the image is child pornography based solely on the company’s comparison of the hash value of the image and the hash value in a digital database said to contain known child pornography when there is no evidence that the database actually contains images of child pornography, how the images in it were selected, or who selected them? IL. Does a police officer go beyond a private company’s search, which merely compared the hash value of a digital file to hash values in a digital database said to contain known child pornography, by opening the file and viewing an image in it without a warrant to confirm that the image is child pornography? Ill. Has this Court’s holding in United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 123-25 (1984) — that it was not a search for the government to field test white powder revealed to private employees when a package was damaged — been abrogated by the property rights analysis of the Fourth Amendment in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012)? See United States v. Ackerman, 831 F.3d 1292, 1307 (10th Cir. 2016) (per Gorsuch, J.). 1