Federal Authorities Required To Get Warrant Even After Finding Child Porn

A federal court decided evidence of child pornography is inadmissible because it was acquired without a warrant. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled last week in favor of a Kansas man who sent four explicitly inappropriate images as attachments in an email through his AOL account. Walter Ackerman was sentenced to 170 months in prison, but was not taken into custody because of his appeal. The messages were flagged by AOL’s hash value matching algorithm, which is often used by telecommunications companies to detect impropriety while limiting privacy violations, according to Ars Technica. AOL sent the tagged images to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), in which the agency confirmed Ackerman did in fact send illicit pictures. But the 10th Circuit was forced to determine if the NCMEC was a “government entity or agent,” because such a classification would mandate it follow the standards of the Fourth Amendment — namely obtaining a warrant to open a suspect’s email. “How can we tell if NCMEC acted as the government’s agent in this case,” the court document asks. “An agency relationship is usually said to ‘result from the manifestation of consent by one person to another that the other shall act on his behalf and subject to his control, and consent by the other so to act.'”

The court ruled that it was a government agency, or at least in this instance, since it was the NCMEC doing work for the government. Therefore the evidence of the four child pornography images have to be suppressed as part of the case and prosecutors have to look elsewhere for a conviction. “There can be no doubt NCMEC does important work and that its work can continue without interruption,” U.S. Circuit Justice Neil Gorsuch stressed. He concluded that there are opportunities for other evidence to arise because “changes in how reports are submitted or reviewed might allow NCMEC to access attachments with matching hash values directly, without reviewing email correspondence or other attachments…” Follow Eric on Twitter Send tips to [email protected]. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].