The headline is misleading, but definitely catchy:

Porn-Sniffing Dog Helped Bring Down Subway Star Jared Fogle.

No, dogs cannot smell porn. Not kiddie porn. Not adult porn. Not lawful or unlawful porn. Not porn at all. A $5 footlong, sure, but pretty much anyone can smell that, not that they necessarily want to unless they’ve made millions off them.

Yet, apparently, dogs (Labradors in particular) can be trained to sniff out data storage devices. Whoda thunk?

A rambunctious black Labrador named Bear — one of only five dogs in the nation trained to sniff out electronic data devices — played a key role in thearrest of former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle on child-porn charges. The 2-year-old rescue pooch nosed out a thumb drive that humans had failed to find during a search of Fogle’s Indiana house in July, several weeks before he agreed to plead guilty to having X-rated images of minors and paying to have sex with teenage girls.

According to Bear’s trainer, the dog was trained to smell the chemicals used in the manufacture of the devices, in this case a thumb drive. And if the substance of the article is true, it works, as the dog found a thumb drive that otherwise eluded detection.

Bear’s dog whisperer, Todd Jordan, gave NBC News a demonstration of how he works his magic, walking him through an apartment while repeatedly giving him the command “Seek!” The dog zeroed in on a kitchen drawer, which Jordan opened to reveal a device. “Good boy!” he told Bear, giving him a handful of food.

While the question of whether dogs can and should be used as a proxy for probable cause, whether to search directly or to obtain a warrant to search, is one of grave concerns, as it’s fraught with substantial failings, plus its efficacy is little different from a coin toss, the “porn sniffing dog” presents a very different picture.

Assuming that the dog was brought in following a search pursuant to a properly authorized warrant which enabled the seizure of all digital media storage devices, and only with such proper authorization, sniffed out a drive that was inexplicably left inside an aluminum foil wrapped Italian BMT in the freezer, it’s a totally acceptable success story. Yay, doggie.

So what if the pooch falsely reacted a half dozen times along the way. He scratched at a drawer? So they open the drawer, find nothing and move on. No harm, no foul. There is no mention of whether the chemicals that give rise to an alert for a thumb drive are also found in, say, Subway Herb and Garlic bread. And if so, it just provides another place to look, which is what one does when executing a search warrant.

But success stories like this, adding yet another data point to the mythical status of the dog’s nose, also carry the potential to mistakenly extrapolate one success into an erroneously conceived basis for other, very harmful, uses.

Consider such a dog being used to sniff out storage devices at the border because they weren’t put through the x-ray machine as rules require. And so, a three-year-old gets a deeply disturbing full body rubbing (though not by Jared, because he never saw the pizza box employment opportunity) when his only crime was touching his Gameboy (that’s not a euphemism) before boarding.

No doubt, the possibilities in the real world far exceed my meager imagination of how sniffing out data storage devices could lead to unanticipated and unauthorized searches. The point is that there can well be perfectly viable, indeed, quite sound, uses for the dog’s particular talents, that don’t implicate a constitutional right, and then there are other uses that will stink.

Much the way other dogs can pick up the scent of a fugitive or a cache of cocaine, Bear can smell the components of electronic media, even a micro-card as small as a fingernail that a suspect could easily hide. “Labs are the best on this,” said Jordan, fending off playful licks from Bear. “They’ll do anything to please their owner.”

That a dog can sniff out a tiny micro-device this is really quite remarkable. And no one would suggest that there is something wrong with law enforcement’s ability to locate evidence of electronic crime under the right circumstances.

But then, the line that “they’ll do anything to please their owner” sets off alarms. That too is true of the drug sniffing dogs, who will alert at the slightest hint that it’s what would make their owner happy. And when the owner, or better stated, handler, wants a reason to search, there’s a dog to provide the excuse.

The issue never was, and is not now, that dogs are not useful tools in finding scents that enable the locating of contraband, whether it’s those 27 kilos of coke or that fingernail-sized micro-chip. It’s all good, provided it’s not the basis for probable cause to search in the first place.

And yet, some judge, somewhere, will be told, and believe, that dogs can not only smell the chemicals used in the manufacture of digital storage devices, but can smell the child porn embedded. And some prosecutor, somewhere, will argue that kiddie porn smells different, emits the stench of horror of rape and abuse, of a child that must be saved. Sign that warrant for the children, your honor.

And some judge, somewhere, ignorant of the limits of dog sniffs, of their false positives and owner pleasing desires of a Lab, and finding some bizarre common sense acceptance of the notion that child porn smells different on a thumb drive than any other digital content, will put his name on that warrant.

Bear, the dog, did good here, but it’s critical to understand and remember that it’s good because no one relied on a dog to provide probable cause to search for child porn. No matter what argument is proffered, even the sweetest and best trained dog doesn’t have the ability to smell the awful odor of evil content.