Personal Injury Law

Do You You Know What “Hash Value” Is? New York State Uses It to Combat Child Pornography on the Internet

Every online picture has a unique “Hash Value” that, once identified and collected, can be used to digitally match the same image anywhere else it is distributed. It is analagous to a fingerprint. As part of an undercover investigation, the New York State Attorney General’s office built a library of the Hash Values for images identified as being child pornography, enabling investigators to filter through tens of thousands of online files at a time, speedily identifying which Internet Service Providers were providing access to child pornography images. This led to three of the world’s largest Internet Service Providers (”ISPs”), Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to reach an agreement, announced by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, to shut down major sources of online child pornography. 

Full post as published by Legal Blog on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).