If a computer has a connection to the internet means no warrant is required for the US government to hack it, a Virginia court has ruled.

The judge angered privacy campaigners by reasoning that since no connected computer "is immune from invasion”, no user should ever expect their their activity to remain secret.

The decision was part of a case brought after an investigation into “Playpen”, a child porn website on the dark web, which the FBI hacked to find offenders.

Following the investigation, hundreds were prosecuted for offences relating to indecent imagery.

But despite the unsympathetic defendants in these cases, privacy campaigners warned the ruling had wider implications.

Scarlet Kim, legal officer at Privacy International, told The Independent the verdict would have "astounding implications for the privacy and security of anyone who owns an electronic device".

"The district court’s dangerous evisceration of a core constitutional protection would render all our personal digital devices susceptible to warrantless search or seizure by the government," she said.

"The justification that the rise in hacking destroys a reasonable expectation of privacy in these devices is illogical and absurd.

"Just because lock-picking is a well-known technique for breaking into homes hardly eliminates our expectation of privacy in that sphere."

7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Show all 7 1 /7 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Claude Shannon (1916-2001) Shannon took the work done by Boole and re-purposes it for computers, allowing us to understand how to share information with the. It begun “information theory” — a system of thought that would let us build the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) The internet now is largely algorithms: formulas or procedures that computers can run to solve problems. Those are so deeply integrated into our world that they are almost invisible. But Lovelace created the first one, in the early 19th century, helping lay the groundwork for the machine learning and artificial intelligence that now runs the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit George Boole (1815-1864) Boole helped formulate the kind of logic that would allow the internet and the binary that powers it to flourish. The structures of thinking that he proposed would eventually come to allow computers to understand us, and power the search engines that we use to get around the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Leonard Kleinrock (1934-) Kleinrock helped formulate the idea of packet switching, a central part of the way that computers are able to share information with each other over networks. The theoretical frameworks that he proposed would eventually become the same technology that allows almost every computer in the world to send and receive information from the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Vint Cerf (1943-) and Robert Kahn (1938-) Together Cerf and Kahn helped invent the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). Those two technologies decide how computers communicate each other — in essence creating the internet as we know it Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Ray Tomlinson (1941-) Life online wouldn’t be what it is today without email. Tomlinson created a system to allow people to send messages to each other over ARPANET Andreu Veà 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Larry Roberts (1937-) Larry Roberts helped create ARPANET, a military network that helped uncover and prove many of the technologies that would go on to power the internet. While Tim Berners-Lee often gets hailed for creating the web, Roberts also contributed to the early work that went into helping him Michel Bakni

According to court documents, Playpen had over 150,000 members. Over two weeks, the FBI hacked into over 1,000 computers using a single warrant.

Senior District Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr upheld the use of the warrant.

“Here, the court finds that defendant possessed no reasonable expectation of privacy in his computer's IP address, so the Government's acquisition of the IP address did not represent a prohibited Fourth Amendment search," the judge wrote in his ruling.