Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Eastern District of Kentucky at Covington.
No. 2:16-cr-00047-1—David L. Bunning, District Judge.
Argued: December 11, 2019
Decided and Filed: December 3, 2020
Before: McKEAGUE, KETHLEDGE, and MURPHY, Circuit Judges.
_________________________
OPINION
_________________________
MURPHY, Circuit Judge. Courts often must apply the legal rules arising from fixed
constitutional rights to new technologies in an evolving world. The First Amendment’s rules for
speech apply to debate on the internet. Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1735–36
(2017). The Second Amendment’s rules for firearms apply to weapons that did not exist “at the
time of the founding.” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 582 (2008). The Supreme
Court has made the same point for the rights at issue in this criminal case: The Fourth
Amendment right against “unreasonable searches” and the Sixth Amendment right to confront
“witnesses.” See Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34–36 (2001); Melendez-Diaz v.
Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305, 315–17 (2009). We must consider how the established rules for
these traditional rights should apply to a novel method for combatting child pornography: hashvalue matching.
. . .
For these reasons and those that follow, we affirm Miller’s convictions. |