Orin Kerr

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Orin Kerr is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. He is a nationally recognized scholar of criminal procedure and computer crime law. Before becoming a law professor, Kerr was a trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section at the Department of Justice and a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. He is a former law clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Leonard I. Garth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

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Encryption

The Fifth Amendment and Compelled Decryption

A recurring question in law-of-digital-evidence investigations is how the Fifth Amendment applies to acts of compelled decryption. In these cases, the government gets an order directing a person to enter a password to unlock a device. The subject of the order then pleads the Fifth. How should a court rule? I wanted to flag two of my recent writings on this issue.

Fourth Amendment

Opening a File Whose Hash Matched Known Child Pornography Is Not a ‘Search,’ Fifth Circuit Rules

The Fifth Circuit has handed down a fascinating computer search case in United States v. Reddick. Here's the question: If a private company runs a hash of a file and compares the hash to those of known images of child pornography, and it finds a match to a known image and forwards on the file to the government, is it a “search” for the government to then open the file to confirm it is child pornography?