Judge rules a police ‘hack’ can be a search

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that hacking someone’s computer counts as a “search,” meaning police must get a warrant to hack into someone’s computer. Senior US District Judge David Alan Ezra of the San Antonio division of the Western District of Texas court ruled that the FBI needed a proper warrant when it hacked Jeffrey Jerry Torres’s computer.

Torres is facing charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. Torres and others were allegedly caught by the FBI for using the dark web child pornography site, Playpen. “[The contention that] Mr. Torres did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address is of no import. This was unquestionably a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes,” Ezra wrote. In February 2015, the FBI seized and then ran Playpen, for two weeks. In that time they installed malware on users computers to identify suspects. In a previous case, a judge had ruled that because when users accessed Playpen, via the dark web browser Tor, they made their IP address known to another computer to access Tor, thus giving up any reasonable expectation of their privacy of their IP address. Ezra disagreed with this, supporting the idea that Tor users had a reasonable expectation of privacy on the platform. The warrant that the FBI used in the Torres case also came under question because it was used to obtain information beyond the district that it was issued in.