People v. Guerra

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

In January 2017, an NYPD detective ran a forensic software program to investigate the sharing of child sexual abuse material ("CSAM")FN1 on an online "peer-to-peer network."FN2 Such networks allow users to directly share electronic files without connecting to a central internet server. The forensic program identified 19 video files which were being shared from an unknown device at an IP address associated with a multi-family residential building in Queens. On July 27, 2017, police executed a search warrant at the building, which had 12 rented bedrooms with shared kitchens and bathrooms; the defendant shared one of the bedrooms with a roommate. Police seized approximately 20 electronic devices from the building, including a laptop computer from the defendant's room. A forensic preview of the laptop, which was not password protected, found no CSAM but did find digital artifacts indicating that the laptop had been used to run the peer-to-peer network. One of those artifacts was a list of files that had been downloaded using the laptop onto an external USB storage drive, and the titles of those files indicated that they were CSAM. No USB drive was recovered from the building.