The fact the defendant only shared his child pornography with "friends" on the GigaTribe peer-to-peer network does not create a reasonable expectation of privacy. After all, he never otherwise communicated with the officer he was chatting with who requested child porn that he sent. United States v. Brooks, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 178453 (E.D. N.Y. December 17, 2012)*:
Brooks contends that he "maintained a reasonable expectation of privacy" in his GigaTribe files because the peer-to-peer network was open only to "friends." (Def. Br. (Doc. No. 23-5) at 12.) Even accepting that proposition as true, the Supreme Court has "consistently [ ] held that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties." Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979). In applying this principle to emerging internet technologies, courts have uniformly held that a user of a private or "closed" peer-to-peer network such as GigaTribe who makes available files to his "friends" does not have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in those files he shared. See United States v. Soderholm, 11-cr-3050, 2011 WL 5444053, at *7 (D. Neb. Nov. 9, 2011) (holding that the "defendant did not have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the files stored on his computer once he designated those files for sharing with the 'friends' on his private network"); United States v. Sawyer, 786 F. Supp. 2d 1352, 1356 (N.D. Ohio 2011) (holding that the "[d]efendant did not have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the information that he shared over GigaTribe"); United States v. Ladeau, 09-cr-40021, 2010 WL 1427523, at *5 (D. Mass. Apr. 7, 2010) (holding that once the defendant "turned over the information about how to access the network to a third party, his expectation of privacy in the network became objectively unreasonable"). This Court joins in so holding, and finds that once Brooks accepted the undercover agent as a "friend" and designated as shared certain files to which the undercover could gain access, Brooks had no legitimate expectation of privacy in those shared files.
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