District Court Holds that Running Hash Values on Computer Is A Search: The case is United States v. Crist, 2008 WL 4682806 (M.D.Pa. October 22 2008) (Kane, C.J.). It's a child pornography case involving a warrantless search that raises a very interesting and important question of first impression: Is running a hash a Fourth Amendment search? (For background on what a "hash" is and why it matters, see here).

First, the facts. Crist is behind on his rent payments, and his landlord starts to evict him by hiring Sell to remove Crist's belongings and throw them away. Sell comes a cross Crist's computer, and he hands over the computer to his friend Hipple who he knows is looking for a computer. Hipple starts to look through the files, and he comes across child pornography: Hipple freaks out and calls the police. The police then conduct a warrantless forensic examination of the computer:

In the forensic examination, Agent Buckwash used the following procedure. First, Agent Buckwash created an "MD5 hash value" of Crist's hard drive. An MD5 hash value is a unique alphanumeric representation of the data, a sort of "fingerprint" or "digital DNA." When creating the hash value, Agent Buckwash used a "software write protect" in order to ensure that "nothing can be written to that hard drive." Supp. Tr. 88. Next, he ran a virus scan, during which he identified three relatively innocuous viruses. After that, he created an "image," or exact copy, of all the data on Crist's hard drive.

Agent Buckwash then opened up the image (not the actual hard drive) in a software program called EnCase, which is the principal tool in the analysis. He explained that EnCase does not access the hard drive in the traditional manner, i.e., through the computer's operating system. Rather, EnCase "reads the hard drive itself." Supp. Tr. 102. In other words, it reads every file-bit by bit, cluster by cluster-and creates a index of the files contained on the hard drive. EnCase can, therefore, bypass user-defined passwords, "break down complex file structures for examination," and recover "deleted" files as long as those files have not been written over. Supp. Tr. 102-03.

Once in EnCase, Agent Buckwash ran a "hash value and signature analysis on all of the files on the hard drive." Supp. Tr. 89. In doing so, he was able to "ingerprint" each file in the computer. Once he generated hash values of the files, he compared those hash values to the hash values of files that are known or suspected to contain child pornography. Agent Buckwash discovered five videos containing known child pornography. Attachment 5. He discovered 171 videos containing suspected child pornography.

One of the interesting questions here is whether the search that resulted was within the scope of Hipple's private search; different courts have approached this question differently. But for now the most interesting question is whether running the hash was a Fourth Amendment search. The Court concluded that it was, and that the evidence of child pornography discovered had to be suppressed:

The Government argues that no search occurred in running the EnCase program because the agents "didn't look at any files, they simply accessed the computer." 2d Supp. Tr. 16. The Court rejects this view and finds that the "running of hash values" is a search protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Computers are composed of many compartments, among them a "hard drive," which in turn is composed of many "platters," or disks. To derive the hash values of Crist's computer, the Government physically removed the hard drive from the computer, created a duplicate image of the hard drive without physically invading it, and applied the EnCase program to each compartment, disk, file, folder, and bit.2d Supp. Tr. 18-19. By subjecting the entire computer to a hash value analysis-every file, internet history, picture, and "buddy list" became available for Government review. Such examination constitutes a search.

I think this is generally a correct result: See my article Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531 (2005), for the details. Still, given the lack of analysis here it's somewhat hard to know what to make of the decision. Which stage was the search — the creating the duplicate? The running of the hash? It's not really clear. I don't think it matters very much to this case, because the agent who got the positive hit on the hashes didn't then get a warrant. Instead, he immediately switched over to the EnCase "gallery view" function to see the images, which seems to be to be undoudtedly a search. Still, it's a really interesting question.

So can open source weather out the economic storm? Emerging from the dot-com bust, open source has matured, its legal framework and values are established, and serious players are in the game. But as this post on ZDNet points out, consolidation is on the way. “IDC renamed its LinuxWorld Show in San Francisco next year Open Source World – a clear shot across the bow at O’Reilly’s OSCON.” Will open source (from free to lower-cost alternatives to commercial software) flourish in a time of tightening budgets or will projects quietly go away for lack of funding (VC and that pesky business model thing) and, let’s face it, the “extra time” of IT pros tasked yet again to do more with less?

It’s October 2008 and Charles Babcock writes, “CA Embraces Virtualization As Future of Data Center Management”. Beyond keeping up with what competitors are doing, I enjoy this article for the masterful way it depicts the nightmare that is working with traditional frameworks. Too slow, too expensive, too complex, too many modules – it’s all in here. And somehow, I don’t think that was the point of it. So, $154,000 for CA Data Center Automation Manager – which can “consult” the CA CMDB (pricing starting at what do you think, something like $500K to a million – don’t forget those services) plus CA Wily APM (Introscope 8 and Wily Customer Experience Manager 4.2; pricing anyone?) metrics that get fed back into Data Center Automation Manager to help determine the virtual machine resources that are needed. Plus can also integrate info from CA Endeavor’s software change management tracking and CA SysView and in future with CA Management Suite for Mainframe Linux, potentially. I am not kidding about this list. And, we’ve been hearing this for a while – “Unicenter” the brand goes away and is replaced by “CA NSM”. The brand goes away. Why retire a successful brand? Ah.

I love this post on EMC, “Eleven Things You Didn’t Know About the World’s Largest External Disk Storage Company.” Although I guess I really don’t know much about Joe Tucci, since #11 says:

“Contrary to conventional thought, it is not true that the EMC President/CEO is the older, gentler brother of the fictional patriarch of HBO’s hit television series.” Hunh. I just googled him, thinking maybe it was a resemblance thing. Nope."

And on a much lighter note. A funny from Dell. 2 years later, I just stumbled across this Proprietaryville , Jibjab-ish video, called Dell the Journey. Legacy systems being escorted onto the Retirement Home bus. Michael Dell as knight in shining armor, singing no less. Joe Tucci and Larry Ellison showing up as heroes leading the charge against Proprietaryville (yes, funny in and of itself). And my favorite, “Now let’s go kick some proprietary apps.”