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No Right to Privacy When Your Computer Is Repaired
Billosaur writes "ZDNet's Police Blotter bring us the interesting story of a Pennsylvania man who brought his computer into Circuit City to have a DVD burner installed on his computer and wound up being arrested for having child pornography on his hard drive. Circuit City employees discovered the child pornography while perusing Kenneth Sodomsky's hard drive for files to test the burner, then proceeded to call the police, who arrested Sodomsky and confiscated the computer. Sodomsky's lawyer argued in court that the Circuit City techs had no right to go rifling through the hard drive, and the trial court agreed, but prosecutors appealed and the appeals court overturned the lower court's decision, based on the fact that Sodomsky had consented to the installation of the DVD drive."
Ultimately it doesn't matter whether you have a right to privacy or not. It's not a right you can rely on. Expect the monkeys to paw through your private photos & videos regardless of where you get your PC repaired.
The answer is routine encryption, but let's face it - if you need help installing a DVD drive, you're unlikely to have any idea what encryption even is....
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
That's like taking your car to get it repaired and being pissed off when you get arrested because the mechanic notices the 5 kilos of coke in your back seat. I mean, come on. The guy is an idiot and a criminal and he should go to prison.
You wanna break the law and not get caught? Use some brain cells. Sorry, if I take my computer to get it repaired (and I have), I yank the hard drives. ALWAYS. I have no expectation of privacy when I drop my computer off with a tech. I do it largely because I have client data on my computer and I would be liable if I took it in for repairs and someone stole the data. It's just common sense, and if a criminal can't amass enough common sense to do the same, well, they deserve to be arrested, tried, and convicted.
this century has really started off great for USA. We have been attacked, and that has been used as a premise for all sorts of loss of rights. I wonder how much longer we citizens and patriots will put up with this. Sadly, about 2/3 argue for saving personal liberty, but are will to sacrifice others right to arm, while about 1/3 want the rights to arm, but are willing to give up the personal liberties for other Americans. How soon before ppl realize that a lose of 1 right leads to a lose of other rights. Sadly, many of the folks from WWII learned that, and use to fight this, but nearly all are gone. And those that remain do not care to keep fighting these battles.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Because isn't concealing or helping to conceal a crime against the law in itself?
Without reading the article, what I'm guessing they're saying is that the evidence is not inadmissible in criminal court, because the person installing the hardware (and software, i.e. drivers) had blanket permission to boot up the computer and use it for the purpose of doing the installation. If, in the course of performing the installs, the person stumbles upon evidence that a crime has been committed, you can't retroactively claim that they didn't have permission to use the computer.
What they're probably not saying is that you have no recourse if that person posts the embarassing (but legal) video you made for your spouse folder to YouTube, or even gossips about it.
Just from reading the summary, I have no reason to believe that there's been anything new happening here. The police are held to the same standard all the time.
http://outcampaign.org/
A car analogy that has already been made is redundant, yes. That's what redundant means. But don't let facts get in the way of your temper tantrums; by all means continue to flog your persecution fantasies.
Ok, I'm guessing that the staff at the store were not police officers, so I find it hard to see how them doing something wrong would invalidate evidence gathered by the police, provided that the police did everything right. Now IANAL but it would appear to me that it basically boils down to what the police did after receiving the tip, or does US law actually say the police can't act on tips from the public if the public only knows what they know because of illegal actions? I.e, if I a crook breaks in to somebody's home to steal something, then finds a large quantity of drugs, I'd expect that the police would need a warrant to search the house, but surely the mere fact that the crook tipped them of doesn't mean they can't investigate? Thus I'm guessing that the real issue here is weather the police would have needed a warrant to have a look at the computer while it was in repair. What is precedence on that? Does the police need a warrant to search your car while it is being repaired, or can the mechanic just let them have a look around if they want to ?
He might actually have a right to privacy, however he would have to sue circuit city to get restitution for it being infringed. IANAL but I am a human being, and if someone who is not working at the behest of the police infringes on someone's rights but also discovers evidence and turns it over to the police, that evidence should be admissible. For example if a thief breaks into someone's home and discovers child porn and hands it over to the police, the prosecutor should be allowed to use that evidence. Now if there was evidence that the thief was working for the police (for example they routinely handed over evidence to the police) that would be a different story.
Take out all the HDDs before you send it in to be repaired. This is prudent even if you're not concerned with privacy (but you should be) to protect your data from the idiots at the repair center that might finish off their work with a complimentary format and reinstall. I've seen that happen before. I don't have much sympathy for people who tried and failed to hide their child porn, but as with most losses of privacy it has a small impact on guilty people (who will just find a way around it) and a huge impact on the rest of us.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Next you'll be saying that eyewitnesses reporting what they see to police is infringing on someone's privacy.
Paranoia abound. First off, that he left his computer in another's custody negates their role in search and seizure. Secondly, an investigator makes the final judgment about an actual crime or otherwise.
That the tech was rifling through his photos looking for pictures of his wife or hot 19yo daughter is irrelevant. That is a matter of internal security and policy, and potential prosecution in its own right, but Sodomsky's possession of child pornography should not be tainted by this action.
It is VERY easy to accidentally uncover stuff you don't want or mean to when working with Windows. I have more than once stumbled upon private information while working with a customer's computer by simply way of the folder previews in Windows XP. You open a folder with pictures and there's thumbnails all over the place.
Most techs have some kind of ethical standard, written or unwritten, which prevents them from engrossed reading of personal documents and unnecessary browsing of media, as well as not divulging or discussing private information found in the course of normal work.
In Florida, as soon as you come across what you even think is child porn on a client computer, that computer and all around it immediately become a crime scene and cops must be called immediately. No arrests or charges are made until authorities investigate and make a final decision.
If the investigation deems necessary, an arrest is made and the whole thing can go to court where the accused has the right to proclaim his innocence and the prosecution has the burden of proving guilt. If the investigation determines that the media is not of concern, the customer is miffed, but life goes on. If the case goes to trial and the accused is exonerated, then only the court of public opinion lays judgment.
I fail to see a problem with this system.
The constitutional Right To Privacy, to the extent that it exists at all, applies only to govenment agencies.
The defendant might try bringing a civil action.
But no matter hiw you frame the issues, there is only a snowball's chance in hell that a jury will punish Circuit City for reporting a crime it discovered in the ordinary course of business.
One huge difference:
The people at the photo development place can be very sure that a person under 18 was molested by the person who brought in the roll of film.
The person with under-18 porn on their computer might never have molested a minor
Thus I think that child porn should only be considered as evidence for someone molesting a child, but not a crime in its own right, as that makes it very easy to frame someone just by emailing them some pictures. Or what if the tech in this case planted the pictures on the hard drive? And then if you make having artifically generated pictures or text stories that depict people under 18 having sex illegal, that is just crazy, as no kids were ever harmed there. What about someone under 18 taking a picture of themselves?
Of course, if you like the idea of thought police, where you can be arrested for creating something from your imagination that is evil, then where does it stop?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
If I had been the guy's lawyer, the first thing I would have argued is that since the evidence was not uncovered by a sworn police officer, it could have been planted. What if this guy was a rude on the clerk, who was a vindictive bastard and decided to frame him? Or maybe a jolly clerk may have decided to pull a prank that went out of control when someone in the shop contacted the police ("hey Jimbo! this guy's name is Sodomsky, guess what I found on his drive!").
Yes, the courts could have checked the last-modified filestat, but that can be tampered too.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
I don't know about anyone else, but 'poking around for files' is pretty damn intrusive. Just burn a couple of files on the desktop to the CD rom.
I hate child porn as much as anyone else, but this stinks of people looking for personal details on their clients that are none of their business. This shady shit has to stop.
What's so shady? They just happened to notice he had kiddie porn on his computer and reported it. It wasn't a conspiracy; I'll bet my tinfoil hat on that one.
When you send something in for repair you are giving the tech the right to look at your things. You are in fact asking (in many cases paying) them to do that. The presence of illegal things in that context is your risk. The mechanic might not say anything about some roaches in the ashtray, but they will probably call the cops if they are fixing your tail lights and notice that your dead wife is in the trunk.
The techs weren't doing anything wrong or unusual here. They probably needed to find about 4GB of stuff to burn, and even if that wasn't what they needed as in this case they would probably have to poke around in the files to fix/troubleshoot the computer. That is what techs do. And who cares if you have 9 GB of porn on your system as long as its not kiddies? Everyone has that, and to be honest just having porn is probably an invitation for the techs to check out your stash even if you hadn't given them permission to go through the HD.
No-one is arguing that child porn should be protected (although elsewhere some *would* argue, that only producing it should be an offense).
What's at issue is that next time a repair guy goes through your files and sees "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..." and is going to report *that* too.
Next thing you know, you'll have your ass hauled from workplace to the county jail. Apologies will be slow in coming, and your work buddies may not be joining you at lunch for a while.
WHat's also at issue is that submitting a computer for repairs does not give the service people a blank check to read my email or browse through my vacation pictures. I fix my own machine, but I don't fix my car myself, and I expect the technician not to rummage through stuff I may have left in the boot, looking for thrills.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Quite directly and sensibly. As the head of the department, I'd have the guy who reported it fired. No, not because I want to protect a pedophile. But he simply has no business in a customer's personal files. Yes, in this case breaking into the privacy of the person helped discovering another crime. Yes, that's "another". Not "a", not even "a more serious".
I happen to get a lot of client PCs on my desk, for similar matters. We do forensics for various high profile customers who want to follow the trail when a trojan hijacks their machine and they want to have proof how it happened. Which also means we got quite a few certs from various places, private and governmental, that allow our findings to be used as evidence in a trial. Looking through a customer's personal files (or any files not related to the problem outlined in very fine detail) is simply a no-go. No matter what.
Yes, that means that I would have to let a pedophile get off the hook. By the contract between my company and the customer, and (as odd as this may sound), even by law. I must not look at those files. Having certain customers from certain companies that deal with certain topics plays a role here, but that's not the point.
Should I accidently look at a file that does not belong to the case at hand (for example, when looking for trojan screenshots and I happen to run across a porn pic that happens to be in the same location a certain trojan would put its pics, or when undeleting files and perusing the findings), I have to ignore it. I never saw it. For all I know, it does not exist.
Now, the kid who discovered that pedophile pics might consider himself being in the right. IMO, he's not. He broke the primary law of business: Don't break your contract with your customer. Don't invade your customer's (or anyone's) privacy.
Yes, I consider an invasion into privacy a bigger crime than collecting kiddy porn. In other words, our politicians are lower than pedos in my books.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The MAFIAA has been drumming it into everyone that just because someone has files on his computer doesn't mean he or anyone else has a right to make additional unauthorized copies to blank CDs or DVDs. Everything is copyrighted, even if unpublished. It doesn't matter that he's an individual and not a corporate association.
They should have put in their own test disk of data, read from that, then burned that back. That way they'd have tested both reading and writing ability of the drive without invading anyone's privacy. Or if they were afraid of modifying blank sectors, they could have plugged in a company USB drive with data they had rights to copy for testing the DVD burner and used that data instead. Surely they have a drive with boot test ISOs from corporate they can burn to replenish their supply, or other promotional disks.
If they didn't find child porn, what were they going to do with the disk they burned anyway? Retain it for later data mining? Distribute copies? Give it back to the customer? Just throw it in the trash, or shred it first?
Snooping around in a customer's drive for data to burn is not necessary to perform a hardware test on a DVD burner, and is an attempt to violate his or others' copyrights. He could civil-sue Circuit City (5 times fast) for attempted copyright infringement with premeditation... or something like that. IANAL.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The kind of "Freedom" you guys enjoy in the USA has been earned. You had a great consitution and proper personal freedoms but you let various people scare you into shredding that constitution and those freedoms.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yes, I do repairs and unless he had the shit on his desktop there is no way a tech should see it in this situation. I just installed a DVD drive in a system earlier this week, to test it I just dumped a random file from the user desktop onto a disk. There is no reason to even browse whats on the drive, let alone open anything up and see what it is. That said, if I did happen to see a file that had a name that sounded like kiddie porn I would feel obligated to open it to verify. Fuck anyone who is into kiddie porn. The only time I've ever seen someone's porn collection was when they had set a porn image as their desktop background. It's totally unethical to go rummaging through files and any of my techs who does it gets reprimanded, more than once and they get fired.
If the lens on my digital camera breaks, can the repairman view my pictures?
You don't need to "find about 4GB of stuff to burn" in order to check a DVD-burner. What's the matter, these techs never heard of any of the dozens of diagnostic programs that fit on a flash drive that will test your burner, your hard drive, and just about everything else on your PC? I don't even know what to say...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I freelance, and I work for a few casinos, sportsbooks, and some investment firms.
I have a very clear data policy publicly available on my site, and I ask all my customers to read them.
I have these to protect myself and to protect my clients. I always tell them what data/logins/access I need, and ask them to agree or deny.
Did Circuit City tell the guy that they were about to look into his files? Did they warn him what access they needed, and what they needed to modify? If not: well the guy is right.
Note 1: I am not sorry for a kiddiporn lover who gets arrested.
Note 2: My data policy can cost my life, so I am very open and strict about it. Most importantly I always ask clients to give me the least possible access necessary, so a data lifting accusation is out of question.
Note 3: The highest danger factor of being a tech in Central America is losing knee caps/life/fingers after stealing customer info data from a gaming operation. It is best to not even attempt is, and even better to not even get suspected.
You make me sad.
It's obviously not a conspiracy, but so what? It is completely wrong.
They were hoping for shots of his wife, instead found some child porn, and suddenly because caped crusaders instead of the low-life porn thieves they were.
They are paid to install DVD drives and don't have an OTS test disk that they burn? Bullshit. This is an excuse made up after the fact, and the cops are only too happy to catch this guy - why question a convenient excuse about a process they don't really understand anyway.
And you're willing to throw away your rights for a PC upgrade. I hope you don't vote.
Or better yet ... don't download child porn.
you don't have to give at&t permission to listen to your phone calls - the government will.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Is everybody here sure they don't have any child pornography on their computers?
I'm not.
You don't have to be looking for it to stumble on it.
It can be in spam mail, it can be in newsgroups where you wouldn't expect it to be.
You could be happily downloading from some "hairy MILFs" binary newsgroup and some idiot has uploaded pictures of 6 year olds.
If these people don't respect the well being of children, you think they would obey newsgroup guidelines?
You just downloaded all of today's hairy MILFs then the phone rang, you got busy with other stuff, you never looked at it.
You don't know if there is child porn in there.
Moral of the story?
Hide all your p0rn before you bring your puter for repair cause you never know what might be lurking in there.
There seems to be a chain of custody problem with evidence gathered in this way ... who knows what the third party did before they gave it to the police.
This is why I maintain a spare drive...for times I have to send my laptop in for repairs (not the kiddie porn thing).
Load a clean copy of an OS on there, verify that it works, then submit the machine with that in. And NO, I'm not talking about pirating Windows by installing a second copy. Ubuntu works fine. If they can't use it, they can wipe the drive and install Windows on it again. It's just going to get wiped and re-Ubuntu'ed when it gets back anyhow. I then slam my Windows drive back in and voila!
I have too much sensitive data on my drive to turn it in. And I've seen too many clients lose literally their ENTIRE business' data because they didn't do backups before sending a computer in that was later wiped.
As I have backups, if it's my hard drive that dies (or the machine is replaced by one that's somehow different enough to make my original drive not work, I can recover my data.
It's easy. Buy the smallest hard drive you can with the thing. And get one of an acceptable size after-market.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There are two issues here that need to be distinguished. One is whether the techs had any business going through the guy's files. The other is whether the state can use what they discovered against him. To the first, I would say that although it isn't safe to assume that the techs won't go through your files, they don't have any business doing so except to the generally limited extent that it is necessary for their work. Obviously if you have a problem with corrupted files they're going to want to look at the files, and they may well need to look at various kinds of system files and config files, but most of the time there is no good reason for them to look at other files. If they want to test a DVD burner, they can perfectly well use a file that they keep for that purpose.
On the second issue I am surprised at the trial court's ruling. As a rule, the state is entitled to use evidence whether or not it was legally obtained so long as it wasn't the state that broke the rules. If the person who obtains evidence is a police officer or is acting as an agent of the state, the evidence must be excluded if there was no search warrant and it does not fall under one of the exceptions to the need for a warrant. If, however, the evidence is obtained by a private party acting on his own, not at the behest of the police, it is generally admissible even if the private party had no right to do what it did. The principle is that the state should not be penalized for actions outside of its control. The Fourth Amendment constraints government action, not that of other parties.
It's all well and good to debate the general case of whether there is an expectation of privacy when you hire someone to work on your PC. But what matters in this case is the specific agreement. I'm sure the store has a standard form with lots of boilerplate where the customer grants them rights to do such and such with their computer, waives certain liabilities, etc. The specifics of that agreement are really what's important, without that you can't say whether it was legal or not.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you insightful. It amazes me that people don't think that they'll get reported for that.
Gary Glitter got busted for that in a similar manner quite a while back. Realistically, if you hand your computer in for repair they may very well have to look at the files to figure out what's going on. Especially if they need to log in and they're on the desktop.
It does surprise me that people don't realize that computer techs have to report that sort of thing to the authorities when they find out.
Hitler and Stalin came in quietly. W. was freely elected (kind of). The part that amazes me is the number of idiots who argue for lose of gun rights or lose of civil rights (such as privacy), and think that they are being patriotic. The entire group that steals our rights, wraps themselves in the flag, while so many others ignore that.
I would not say that we earned this. We have earned our freedoms. But I will say that due to spineless assholes we are losing them rapidly. I only hope that our children will have the ability to imprison these same idiots who stole and gave them away. These traitors deserve to swing.
It is also considered a fundamental right by most; thus the Ninth Amendment applies:
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
There's at least an argument that such a law would be unconstitutional as it would make computer repair technicians into agents of the state. It's one thing if they act voluntarily to report suspicious files (like here), it's another if there's a criminal penalty for failing to do so. I'm curious and will read up on it. Thanks for the tip.
Post AC!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"They just happened to notice he had kiddie porn on his computer"
.jpg's because they hope there's porn there....
How does that happen exactly? I mean, you're fixing a DVD burner, you put it in, and you want to test it, so you grab some files, and you start looking in them? Or... they look for all the
I guess I'm having a hard time.
Maybe it would be more accurate to say they were trawling his hard drive for cool stuff and they got more than they bargained for?
The information isn't privileged like it is with attorney-client. The issue here is that the technician violated a law in searching the client's computer for files to use. The idea here is that the evidence should be excluded because the technician had no permission to access those files. In fact from what I've heard, most computer-fixing places have contracts that all employees are held to that states they may not access/view any file that is not directly related in fixing the computer.
If this were a law enforcement officer then the evidence would be excluded because of the exclusionary rule. This doesn't apply to citizens though because they aren't conducting searches and seizures. For the evidence to be excluded here, one would have to prove that the client's rights were violated when the technician accessed the files in question. I'm not sure how much weight the contract holds when it comes to the client's rights being violated.
This might be a case in which the client can sue the technician for breech of contract (for accessing files w/o permission) but the client is still getting thrown in jail because the evidence wasn't discovered illegally. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
My thinking on this is that computing power is finite, so they (whoever "they" is for you) have to choose which file to try to decrypt, so if you have 100 fake encryped containers and 1 real encrypted containers and they can't tell the difference, they'd waste a lot of time. Of course there is always rubber-hose cryptography, but that's a different issue, and if you're enough of a concern to highly placed spooks or cops, you're screwed already, passphrase notwithstanding. Camp X-Ray for you!
Anyway, my point was (I do have one somewhere) is that how screwed would you be in the UK to have a file of random data that you can't prove isn't an encrypted container? Would what seemed originally like a clever trick to play on the authorities basically sentence you to life in prison, since there is no passphrase to turn over?
Right, Assuming thats what happens then it makes sense but I'd hate to see somebody prosecuted solely on the evidence that some tech found child porn (which he could have loaded) on your computer.
This may not be relevant but I think it's worth pointing out that the reason the tech was supposedly looking for files is bullshit. They probably made that up after they discovered the files. The tech was almost certainly looking for normal porn or movies on purpose to copy it. Using a video file to check if a burner is installed correctly is utter nonsense.
I know in some Best Buys it gets so bad that it's not even techs individually doing this sort of thing. Last time I had a friend working at one they even had a server setup where they copied customers files that were interesting so everyone could get at them. I can't imagine Circuit City is any different.
This thing is only going to get worse. Fact is some people are always going to have reasonable reasons for trusting someone else to work on their computer. A lot of these techs even use tools to override any normal security just to make their jobs easier. People are going to have to get smart about not putting things they want private on non removable media. Software is going to have to become more mature at making sure normal users know where there information is on their drive and know how to remove it also.
Now, I'm not arguing that the guy shouldn't be busted for child pornography. But I do think the guys privacy was violated by the techs: From the article, we know that the techs did a search for video files "to test the burner". Well, you don't need video files to test the burner, so based on my understanding of human nature within menial jobs, they guys were probably having a laugh about what kind of porn the guy had on his computer. Probably it's that systematic too. I would be surprised if the techs in question didn't have a pretty big stash of burnt porn, collected from various computer users.
Now, yeah, the guy should have been more careful with his data, especially concerning the nature of the data. But did he have a reasonable expectation of privacy when bringing his computer in for an hour, to have a dvd burner installed. That's actually a question of policy, and I think we should make it policy that YES we should have that right. If I'm going to give up the privacy of my data, I think that should be explicit, and that the techs should be bound to violate my privacy only to the minimum extent necessary (which doesn't include searching my hard drive for video files).
Discussing these issues has nothing to do with defending child-pornography (as the ACLU understands). We have to question these things to protect our more pedestrian privacy interests, which would otherwise be compromised by such systems. For example, I have some artistic movies of me and my girlfriend on my hard drive. They're on a linux partition, and I do my own repairs, but if I were just some non tech-savvy joe, I wouldn't want the techs searching for video files so they and their colleagues can have a laugh over me shtupping my gf, or (god forbid) burning a copy for their own use. And based on the procedure described in the article, I'd bet my money that that's happening pretty often.
Sure the guy is probably a dope, but I doubt he had his files on the desktop or some easily discovered place. When the tech guys are sitting with the criminal prosecutors and or the police they have to come up with a description of their activities that doesn't make them sound criminal, so "searching for video files to test the burner" sounds more reasonable than "killing some boredom by seeing what kinda freaky shit the guy had on his PC".
What amazes me is that more people haven't commented on the poor guy's name. Sodomsky? The poor guy was doomed from the beginning.
I work for a computer repair shop between uni, a similar thing happened at our shop.
We were hired to do regular matinence, but discovered huge amounts of child pornography.
The legal concerns of our position were important to us, but not as important as the possibility that this crime could go on, uninhibited.
The case was tried and the idea that we had no right to look at the files was not even mentioned in the case. The fact was that he had child porn. It was wrong and everything else was a non issue. I agree people should have privacy and civil liberties, but sometimes you have to put aside the politics and take things at face value.
Legalizing child porn because of the first amendment really isn't that strange (I don't buy the claim that porn is somehow exempt from the speech label when pretty much everything else is covered), it serves to point out the flaws of the constitution. In the end the constitution really IS a "goddamn piece of paper", it's a paper designed to represent the will of the states and people but you can be pretty damn sure neither the states nor the people really want to enforce it to its fullest. I guess it would work better to actually spell these things out in the constitution, i.e. have the first amendment say explicitely that pornography is not speech and what constitutes pornography instead of having that remain as an unspoken rule or the result of some judge's moral feelings. Update the constitution to reflect what it is understood to mean, don't leave the thing there as a relic that says almost nothing because it's been completely reinterpreted. Also introduce new features that have been asked for quite often, e.g. enforced age ratings on media (states have been asking for that quite a few times but were shot down because the constitution disagrees when the actual wording of the constitution doesn't even say anything about states' rights there). The constitution serves the people, not the other way around.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF215-Kitty_Photographer.jpg
The sad thing, this has happened. Parents in the UK have been arrested for pretty much exactly this. From what I can see, no one seriously thinks they were abusing their children - they just took a few admittedly tasteless pictures of them.
E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_John Controversy struck in late September of 2007 when police confiscated a picture taken by a well known photographer by the name of Nan Goldin that featured two naked prepubescent girls. The concern surrounding the picture was the "provocative" position they were standing in. The picture was one of 4,000 pictures in John's collection. On October 27, 2007, the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. I actually think that pictures should be legal in themselves. If they show someone committing a crime, they could be used as evidence to prosecute that person but would not become illegal in themselves. Making pictures illegal when they don't depict any criminal activity is an absurd overreaction.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Opening files on a computer is hardly the same as kicking down a door.
I'd say a better metaphor for it would be calling the fire department to put out a fire in your meth lab.
Well, that's an important point, but that's not what they're arguing about. The issue is with people who are repairing your computer using it as an excuse to go through your stuff. I used to work at a optical drive company, and on occasion needed to test drives against specific discs for unusual errors or BIOS issues. In some cases customers gave me copies of their home movies that were failing to play or causing problems. Watching someone's personal memories on disc at work is a strange thrill, and honestly made me kind of uncomfortable sometimes. If they were just testing the burn process, they would obviously have test files they could use. They just got off on looking into videos that weren't meant for them.
Child porn is disturbing, but I get suspicious any time an article brings it up, because it's almost always being used as an excuse to do something that is otherwise morally unacceptable on the government's or other establishment's part. Invasion of privacy, search and seizure, wiretapping, etc, there are always justifications brought up in the form of "this one time it caught a guy with child porn!" I can't believe that child porn is so rampant that it justifies the laws that are passed with child porn as an excuse. If it truly is, then the only law I could see as effective at that point is castration.
[insert witty quote here]
Perhaps like spammers need "bullet proof hosting" users of pornography, file-sharers, spammers and all types of people who have incriminating info on their PCs need "bullet proof PC repair" services ...
Civil liberties aren't just "politics" that can be set aside for crimes that are *really* bad. That kind of thinking leads to innocent people riding in cattle cars to special camps.
In the example you gave, civil liberties were not set aside. It just wasn't an issue. If someone invites another person to look at their hard disk drive, and the other person sees evidence of a crime, he can report it to authorities. Likewise, if someone offers you a ride in their car, and you see a big bag of pot in the back seat, you can tell the police, and they can arrest the guy.
On the other hand, if the police come up to you and ask you to go through some guy's hard disk to look for child porn, I think that evidence would get thrown out. I believe that in the US they would need a warrant to conduct the search, even if they have you do it.
At least, I think they would need a warrant. These days I'm not too sure. They might have erased that part of the constitution.
While I agree with your post, a minor nitpick: everyone has that right, not just MS partners.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
On an unrelated note I know I can't verify the age of EVERY person in my "adult entertainment" collection, if you define child pornography as strictly as 17 years and 364 days old then yes I may have some on my hard drive... oops :p
This is one of the problems with Porn 2.0 (Porn on Web 2.0, i.e. user generated porn), professional pornography is supposed to go through certain legal requirements to ensure all participants are 18/, and they keep records. Amateur content uploaded to the porn equivalents of YouTube however, have no guarantees whatsoever.
> (I don't buy the claim that porn is somehow exempt from the speech label when pretty
> much everything else is covered
That has always struck me as wrong too. Why is it that "sex" gets special treatment as a topic? Why is it that something intended to arouse those who view it has no social value? It certainly has value to the people who buy it, to the people who watch it, to the people who jerk off or have sex while or after watching it.
Utter crap if you ask me. I can at least see the argument for the exclusion of kiddie porn that children are unfairly exploited in its creation and its those same exploited persons who are the main subjects of the video.
However... anything made with consenting adults... I say is fair game for free speech.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The crime of allowing your computer to keep a local digital copy of a file that someone has deemed "illegal"? Was this guy generating the CP or was he just saving photos that caught his sick fancy? Was he paying for a subscription to access areas where he could get these photos and therefore financially rewarding and encouraging another to assault a child or did he stumble accross them on *chan?
Except for the fact that he isn't arguing the point, what *proof* do we have that the tech themselves didn't plant the CP? If I had it in for someone, that'd be a pretty good start. All you have to do is mention CP and the witch hunt begins.
I know I'm going to get flamed into oblivion for this (not to mention accused of being a pedophile, homophobe and everything else in the book), but, if we take it as proven that homosexuality (being sexually aroused by your own gender) is genetic (or at least something you're born with) and therefor an "abnormality" and at best a "normal variant in human sexual preference" how is pedophilia, necrophilia, and bestiality different? Are we saying it's a choice of "lifestyle" and not something you're born with? How do we prove that?
In many countries of the world it is still illegal to be gay. If someone is born with the abnormality of being attracted to "those below the [arbitrary] age limit", and goes through life never once molesting a child, but only collects images that titillate their particular twisted interests, should they be branded a pariah and be sent to prison for years and years?
"But", you say, "seeing those pictures will encourage them to rape a child!". Hmmm... Does that mean that seeing pictures of naked men will force my gay coworker to rape me?. If I download rape photos, will I be driven to rape, should I be charged with the rapes in the photos? It's like the whole "violent games" argument all over again. Maybe this is some sort of release valve for some people.
Don't get me wrong. I think the exploitation of children is wrong, but I also think that the irrational fear and associated draconian laws are so ridiculous that we can't even hold a rational discussion on the matter any more. I mean, really, a 14 year old girl takes a picture of herself naked in the mirror with her cell-phone and she is convicted of creating and possessing child pornography. A 13 year old girl has sex with her 12 year old BF and is charged as a sexual predator and the victim? WFT?!
Something in me says that the same people who make the most noise in government about pedophilia are the ones that are probably hiding something in themselves, sorta like those politicians that bash gays so bad then get caught soliciting strange men.
C'mon people! If pedophilia is a "genetic disease" we should be working for a cure. If it is a sociopathic "choice" then we should be allowing those "suffering" from it to get treatment, not cart them off to jail.
And if someone assaults a child, charge them with the assault and lock them up. Rape is rape. Kidnapping is kidnapping. Child abuse is child abuse. There are already laws for that. Use them. But destroying someone's life because some pictures were found of a child without proper clothing on is ridiculous. Where I grew up it was normal for a girl to be married off and start having children as soon as she started menstruating. That often made her 12 or 13 years old. That was life. That's the way it had been for untold generations. Suddenly, there's something terrible about those people. My grandmother was married at 14. I guess my grandfather was a sick bastard. Funny, he never struck me that way. They were married for almost 70 years.
Well, I've got my flame-proof panties on and karma to burn. Flame on!
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
"The key difference is whether the STATE has violated your right to privacy. You can't bargain with the state to set a higher or lower expectation of privacy; we have a Constitution that sets a minimum floor of privacy for everyone. But, you can negotiate with a computer repair service--if one service offers "no privacy-we'll read all your files" and the other say "complete privacy, for a little bit more money" then you get to pick which one you like, and to sue the "complete privacy" company if they break their word."
Actually, criminal law kinda trumps civil contract law. If the repair guy finds out that you're committing a crime, not only does any privacy contract become preempted by criminal statute, but the tech is now on notice of a crime, and HIMSELF goes on the hook if he does NOT report it. It's called "accessory after the fact".
And no, you do NOT get to sue, because once the tech gets wind of your crime, the contract of nondisclosure is discharged by a "supervening illegality", in this case, the tech's duty to report you for CP discharges the NDA, because NOT reporting it is against the law. Hence, the supervening illegality.
No silly CIVIL contract is going to protect you if you are involved in a CRIMINAL act. Not even the most expertly drawn up NDA is going to stop someone from being obliged to report you if they find out you're breaking the law, especially if it's a criminal offense.
On top of that, most courts nowadays will consider your entering this contract in bad faith, because you were knowingly and willingly attempting to conceal a criminal act. Heck, the tech could even be charged with obstruction if he tried to go with the NDA he signed.
The only way you can bust someone civilly for exposing you to prosecution is if that someone is your defense attorney, and they wind up breaching their duty to defend you. You can give your lawyer a full confession, and lawyer client privilege OBLIGES them to keep mum. That is the ONLY exception I know of to the "eminent domain" that criminal law posesses over civil matters.
In this case, any money you paid above and beyond the standard rate for "privacy premiums" would likely be owed back as equitable relief, becasue the tech is NOT engaging in any breach of contract that causes you damage, because the contract itself becomes discharged. Since the guy can't complete the contract (he'll go to jail for obstruction/accessory), the contract would most likely be "rolled back".
And you may not even get the money back. Last time I checked, possession of CP is a felony most anywhere, and civil forfeiture laws often call for seizure of "any property involved in a felony", which would probably include any money you spent on trying to cover it up.
As far as privacy is concerned, apart from the tech guy not being a government agent, but simply by putting your computer into someone else's custody you almost certainly give up your "right to a reasonable expectation of privacy", which is what the Supreme Court has established is the basis for 4th amendment protection.
Qualified Disclaimers:
I am not a lawyer.
I DID get straight 4.0's in law class at college.
I ALSO read the RCW's for Washington State.
I discussed UK laws against indecent images here.
Although your post is relatively insightful, I'd like to ask you about your claims that "child porn is clearly a very bad thing" and that "children must have been abused to create it".
As I discussed in the article which I have linked above, a jury will usually decide that naturist images are "indecent" and therefore pornographic in a statutory sense. Do you not feel that it is somewhat absurd to claim that naturist images of children are a "very bad thing" and that "children have been abused" to create such images? Convictions involving naturist images are not rare; they constitute a significant proportion of convictions under the Protection of Children Act.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four