That's because it is BS and this is not how cryptography works. Either the drive was decrypted and they have the file hashes, or the drive was encrypted and they don't. Or they caught the transfers on the wire, but this is much less likely, and impossible to determine if they were recorded on the HDD, because it's encrypted.

This. It's encrypted data. You can't even see where the files are.

I can only surmise that this means that they scanned the content of the hard drives and found data sequences that matched some file hashes of known child pornography.

If that's the case, why do they even need the drive to be decrypted? All they'd have to prove is that the drive was not owned by anyone other than the accused and could then say that there was CP saved onto this drive by the guy.

If they matched the hashes to data on the drive, the files are already on there unencrypted. Could be some space left by a now-deleted unencrypted partition, or maybe some leftover data in a temporary location where the data is saved before being encrypted.

Together with the witness testimony, that seems pretty compelling.

I don't even think they'd need to prove that. It's there and it's in his possession, isn't that alone a crime?

> how can they match hash of encrypted content without the key?

Right!? This sounds like, "We know you have it and we can see it, we just want the password to prove it was _you_ who did it."

Also, whilst I'm here, it does strike me as very odd that the justice system in the United States has such a raging evangelicalism about getting to the truth, that it will impose against a person's rights, just to get at that truth.

To refer to the old Eddie Izzard joke:

"If you commit perjury, I don't care. Don't give a shit. I don't think you should because you grade murder. You have Murder One and Murder Two. You realize that there can be a difference in the level of murder.

So there must be a difference in the level of perjury. Perjury One is when you're saying there's no Holocaust when, you know, 10 million people have died in it, and Perjury Nine, is when you said you shagged someone and you didn't."

The whole precept of the truth being this infallible end-gaol, which must be attained - no matter what, is just as abusively dehumanising as the phrase, "Well, if they weren't doing anything wrong..."

Sorry, wrong meeting... I'll see myself out.