Henry Coke Morgan, Jr., a senior United States District Judge ruled in a legal case of suspected child pornography that police did not require a warrant to hack into the suspects computer.

“The Court finds that no Fourth Amendment violation occurred here because the Government did not need a warrant to capture Defendant's IP address.”

The case concerns Edward Matish, who is charged with child pornography crimes. The FBI hacked into his computer and deployed malware that would track who was viewing the material.

Mark Rumold, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote: “The implications for the decision, if upheld, are staggering: law enforcement would be free to remotely search and seize information from your computer, without a warrant, without probable cause, or without any suspicion at all.”

“It seems unreasonable to think that a computer connected to the Web is immune from invasion,” Morgan, Jr. adds. “Indeed, the opposite holds true: in today's digital world, it appears to be a virtual certainty that computers accessing the Internet can—and eventually will—be hacked,” he writes.

Source: MotherBoard