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Supreme Court Declines Case Over Techs' Right To Search Your PC
An anonymous reader writes "A few years back, a guy was arrested for possessing child pornography after techs at Circuit City found child porn on his computer, while they were installing a DVD player. The guy insisted that the evidence shouldn't be admissible since the techs shouldn't have been snooping through his computer — and a lower court agreed. The appeals court, however, reversed, noting that the guy had given Circuit City the right to do things on his computer — including testing out the newly installed software (which is how the tech claims he found the video). The guy appealed to the Supreme Court, who has declined to hear the case, meaning that the ruling stands for the time being. So, basically, if you hand your computer over to someone else for repairs, at least in some jurisdictions, they may have pretty free rein in terms of what they're allowed to access on your computer."
...WTF!
So, basically, if you hand your computer over to someone else for repairs, at least in some jurisdictions, they may have pretty free rein in terms of what they're allowed to access on your computer.
No, but whatever they find is admissible as evidence in court.
That something is admitted as evidence in court does not mean it was legal to obtain that evidence. Similarly, if something is inadmissible as evidence in court, it could still be legal to obtain that evidence.
http://outcampaign.org/
There's a difference between what they're "allowed to access" and what's admissible in court once they've seen it. The techs aren't the government--things they've seen don't automatically get excluded because they shouldn't have seen them.
If a private citizen breaks into my house and sees something illegal, they can usually alert the cops and have knowledge of that thing be admitted in court, even though they themselves can still be prosecuted for trespassing and breaking and entering.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
"Thou shalt not get caught"
This is right up there with handing the cop your beer or dimebag as you get your driver's license out after being pulled over - if you have something illegal, don't give it to people who A) know that it's illegal, and B) know who you are.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
I should point out this is not always the case.
I know of at least one PC repair company that, when doing any sort of recovery/repair work, asks the customer to sign a form giving permission for them to look at the data files on the computer.
This is just so they can verify a successful fix/file recovery. If the customer doesn't sign the form, fine, but then they have absolutely no guarantee that the repair will be okay, or that their recovered files are not just illegible garbage.
Seems the logical approach to me since it protects the customer's rights;
but then again, if you are stupid enough to keep incriminating of stuff in a visible place, then you shouldn't be surprised if you get caught. I'd be interested to hear WHERE they found the files.
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.
You know, you could always choose NOT to have child pornography on your computer.
I wonder of the Supreme Court would have been more inclined to take the case?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
A month ago a friend of my nephew was killed by a driver in a hit and run collision (I won't call it an accident). My brother in law told me that the way the police found the driver was that her boyfriend took the car to a repair place to be resprayed in a different color. Staff at the repair place looked at the damage and called the police.
If you see evidence of a crime you have to call the police. Thats the law where I live.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
... RIAA dumps Mediasentry in favor of new sweeping deal with Circuit City. Details are currently kept silent, but if you've been downloading music and your computer breaks down, you'll know.
It would be almost brain-dead easy to put anything you want on a computer and then change the file properties to look like it was there before you gained access to the machine. I could do it on any given morning before I've even had a sip of coffee.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Keep your 'private' data on an external hard drive and just leave the system drive for the OS + applications. Extra paranoid people can encrypt it to for good measure.
So, basically, if you hand your computer over to someone else for repairs, at least in some jurisdictions, they may have pretty free rein in terms of what they're allowed to access on your computer.
Would you really take your car to the garage with a 100lbs bag of cocaine on the back seat and then complain that the garage employee looked through the window and reported you? I don't think so... And I don't see how this is any different.
While I certainly despite people who desire or who peddle in child porn (and that includes the government "sting" entrappers themselves who are the LARGEST distributor of the stuff in the country, and who keep the largest amount of it around) this decision dumps barrels of oil onto the slippery slope.
I guarantee that the aforementioned "stingers" are going to start pressuring IT shops to search for the disgusting stuff and report to them. I can even see localities passing laws REQUIRING technicians to search hard drives for illegal material, and probably not just porn, but imagine the RIAA buying themselves some laws requiring techs to report file sharing software and MP3's...
It's a HUGE loophole that needs to be closed. If the evidence would be inadmissible in a criminal court if government actors collected it in that manner (ie: no warrant, no probable cause, no witnessing something happening in front of them) then evidence collected by civilians passed to the government should also be inadmissible. Indeed, in those circumstances, a citizen getting involved in law enforcement by implication is part of the "unorganized militia" and should be subject to the same limitations because they ARE, in effect, a government actor.
Corporatism != Free Market
"the techs should have not snooped" is a defense that implicitly admits the guy had downloaded the video. He get jailed, that's the spirit of the law.
What's troubling is that a pc which is tampered with by a third person, that is the tech repair guy, is then admitted as proof.
A random technician is elevated to the rank of police forensic tech! but how can you trust him not making mistakes (restoring somebody else's partition) or him being corrupted into intentionally downloading illegal stuff to a client PC? nevermind child porn, all you need to ruin a person are a bunch of mp3s, in this brave new world.
And I didn't speak up, because they are horrible nonces.
This is why desktops need to have truecrypt volumes on them too. At some point, almost everyone outside /. readers will need to take their PC in for support. Your Quicken files, emails, EI browsing history and **all media** will all be available to the tech. Also, you need to encrypt your PKI keys, certs, and hopefully, passwords.
I've heard of highly organized teams searching hard drives for movies and music at computer support locations to expand their personal collections. Same when you take your car in for service. If you have any media left inside it, expect that media to be copied off.
I truecrypt my financial data files (quicken and stock trading). Media isn't stored on most computers inside my home, just on the NAS, so there's really nothing on the clients besides a link to the server that is only available from inside the network.
I dont work at CC .. but a larger "repair centre" in canada ...
We have, as part of our SOP, child pornography related rules. They call them "criminal images" in the verbage, however, it is the same. I have yet to "find" something criminal, but to my knowledge, no one goes "fishing" though a computer to look at a persons data. I think true repair techs don't really care WHAT is on someones computer, just get paid your paycheck to fix the thing. IF we are testing a burner and need to use data from a system (ie pictures folder) again .. drag drop, dont care what it is .. test .. label DVD "test burn" give to customer when they come to pick it up.
After doing this for 20 years now .. I can tell you what you ALWAYS will find on a computer that comes in for "repair".
1. Lime/Frostwire - the bane of my job - and telling a "customer/uneducated person" that those types of programs make it more likely to get a virus, they immediately ask you "well, how else can I download free stuff" - my response " you can't"
2. Some sort of torrent client - see #1
3. expired/outdated or no antivirus - which leads to #4
4. massive amounts of spyware/malware/virals
This is my daily grind. Trying to inform the public that just because you CAN do something doesn't mean it makes it A: legal or B: not harmful to your computer environment - "You mean downloading all that porn got me a virus? You mean my limewire folder has massive amounts of trojans in it? ---- but I paid for it ....
Sucker # 12,488 line up please ....
Years ago, I worked for $BIG_PHARMA, and in one of the labs, there was a shared printer and some shared PCs. Each PC required a user to log in, using their own credentials.
One day, one of the female scientists walked over to the printer to retrieve some print jobs, and found full-color pr0n prints sitting on the printer that someone had printed from one of the shared PCs in that lab.
An investigation ensued, and they found the offending machine, but couldn't pinpoint who had actually browsed to the site or printed the images. What they did find, was a VERY organized local directory of pr0n on the machine.
When they were looking through the upstream proxy and web logs, they found the site that the images were sourced from, found the date and time they were viewed and requested, etc. They finally figured out who the culpret was... and terminated him.
HOWEVER , they also found hundreds of other PCs across the company visiting the same site all over the logs, including some VERY high-level directors.
So now what do you do? Do you just fire the one person who was caught because of the reported incident, or do you start firing everybody because they're guilty of the same "offense" (browsing restricted content on company resources).
I don't know how it ended up, but I do know a lot of people were talked to and put on probation/had their public web browsing rights restricted or removed (only internal/intranet allowed).
I wasn't implying that child porn is on the same level as ill-gotten downloads
You mean like ill-gotten gamez? ;-)
Apparently the interwebs like to leave little droppings in our puters. we call them cache.
additionally, say you take an RSS feed or have a usenet scraping script for say, comp.lang.python, and some jackass / police sting operation decides to put "illegal images" on that group? your script automagically grabs them and viola you're guilty.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
For one, I don't know why I'd ever hand a piece of computer equipment with a hard drive in it to the folk at Best Buy, etc. after all the exposes re: naughty technicians surfing the hard drive for porn and other things of interest. There are lots of guides out there on how to do common tasks like hard drive replacement yourself, I'd only hand over a machine with a clean drive, if that.
Secondly, one has to consider the possibility that the images stored on the computer were not deposited there by the person who owns it. Any technician in the store could have used the computer to do some surfing, there is no chain of custody. Next, the images may have been deposited by malware, yet another possibility that I imagine the defense will bring up. Lastly, the images may have been deposited by a previous laptop owner, roommate, etc. - issues for the courts to mull over.
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Feb/05/ln/ln01a.html
"Each member of the computer crime squad (FBI) is given a list of local businesses, Laanui said, with the idea of establishing a
working relationship with all of them."
and
""We're trying to build a rapport with companies, a lot of computer guys don't necessarily know we exist," Laanui said.
"Virtually anyone in the high-tech arena is up for a visit with the FBI.""
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
... without proper attribution. The original author was Mike Masnick, to give credit where it is due. Interestingly, the link in the Techdirt story which pointed to the original AP story was changed in the Slashdot submission - following that link points back to the original version of itself. I suppose that's a form of indirect attribution, but still sloppy. And the reader has to click twice to get to the original news story. A tiny bit of editorial review would have been helpful.
If I managed to be desperate enough to hand my computer over to anyone else, it would be without the hard drive in it, or at least the one with the information I care about.
I'd actually suggest to anyone who buys a new laptop and with the resources, immediately replace the hard drive with a blank one and install your OS of choice. You might even impress them when they're left with registering to Microsoft for you.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Is that with child porn, people get a very "witch hunt" mentality with little consideration for the whole situation. What I mean is if a 19 year old kid has a naked picture of his girlfriend, taken when she was 17, that is "child porn" in the same way that a picture of a 10 year old being sexually abused by a parent is where the law is concerned. You get charged with the same thing for possessing either. Now most rational people would agree that these are not the same things, however it doesn't matter in the eyes of the law. Also, prosecutors are extremely zealous about this stuff. Maybe it is because they don't want to be labeled soft or whatever. No matter the reason, they tend to nail people to the wall even if they shouldn't.
The best example, which I can't find a link to right now unfortunately, was a boyfriend/girlfriend who sent each other naked pictures via e-mail. Both were under age, but teenagers (like 15-17). Both where charged with child porn charges and sentenced to prison, a charge that was upheld on appeal. That's right, they were charged for taking pictures of themselves and sending it to each other. No other distribution.
I run a computer shop and the majority of work is "remove my viruses" or "backup my data". In the case of virus removal most of the viruses are in temp or download folders. I've seen more then my fair share of customer porn, either downloaded or created, in the last 3 years of doing this. When a customer hands me their computer and asks me to clean it up or backup their files it has to be assumed that I am going to be viewing their files. If I blindly backup everything to one of my externals without at least skimming to see what it is I backup then I am liable for what is on my hard drive. Thus far I've been lucky enough not to find child porn or anything illegal (short of music/movies/games) on these computers. The day I do though, is the day the cops get called on it and i'm damn glad that it can be used as evidence.
One thing I haven't seen discussed here.
Typically forensic investigations (i.e. admissible evidence) are carried out using special hardware that prevents any possibility of writing to the media under investigation. This is to avoid any challenges that there's a possibility that the person who "found" the evidence put it there.
If evidence was "found" by Circuit City techs, there is no way to prove that they themselves did not put the evidence there.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The Constitution protects citizens from improper governmental action.
If a burglar breaks into your house, illegally, and discovers a huge marijuana grow operation, the government has done nothing wrong. The government can use the crook's evidence against you. On the other hand, if the burglar was working for the government then the evidence will be thrown out of court.
Nothing new here.
I would love if a Microsoft developer went to Circuit City to get their computer fixed they had some Microsoft source code on that machine, and the tech fixing the machine hated Microsoft...
Has anybody stopped to think that the tech might have planted the child porn on the computer? I could see a few reasons for this:
- The person turning in the computer for repair is the grandfather of someone who pissed you off in high school.
- He's turning in the computer for the fifth time to fix the "cyberspace gigarams", and you want to bring it to a stop.
There was something similar in Atlanta awhile back. A guy was walking home from his job at a local bar at 3 or 4 in the morning or so. A bunch of teenagers get out of a cadillac with a shotgun and a pistol they confront him and he runs for it. They follow and trapped him in an alleyway. He kicked the shotgun out of the one guy's hands and the pistol misfired. While he was running he managed to get a knife out of his backpack and when cornered managed to cut a couple of the teenagers. They ran off, and took their wounded friends to the hospital. The hospital then promptly called the police who had already been talking to the guy who was attacked. The moral is don't go to the hospital if you are wounded doing illegal activity and don't want to get caught (and to this day I always carry a knife in my backpack unless I'm going to the airport).
The more unfortunate thing about this story was that, despite his pleas for not to do that, the guy had his name and face plastered all over the local news as a hero, so the other gang members found out where he lived and camped out by his house. As far as I know he had to move away, the police did manage to get some of the ones who were stalking him though.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
If a technician finds child pornography during the course of performing work on a said computer unrelated to the stored data in question, it should be admissible. However the technician should also be held accountable ie; charged with trespass or the electronic equivalent if he or she has no legitimate need to look at said data in the course of his or her work.
WE can assume that this guy was competent enough that someone would pay him to do what he's doing, which is pretty much all the government cares about. If your maid finds child p0rn in your bedroom while she's vacuuming, is her testimony ineligible because she's a non-English speaking Ukranian with a grade-school education? I mean..she could have totally planted those photos... What about the gardener who finds a dead body under a tree? A mechanic that finds evidence of corporate fraud in the backseat? I think we're all guilty of thinking this is a special case because it's computer related. Yeah, sure the RIAA can payoff techs to look for illegal downloads. They can also pay off your maid and your gardener to go snooping too, or GASP, a private investigator. This opens well...zero precedents that haven't already been explored since the age of paying other people to do stuff for you.
Unless the tech was installing a DVD Burner, he had no business looking at the customers file system as that's a violation of the customers right to privacy. The reason I say this revolves around ethics. If the tech is installing a playback only drive, then all he needs to do for testing purposes is ensure the drive can playback its intended medium. If it can not, then you diagnose the issue which is either hardware related such as using onboard video, or an OS problem in that the appropriate software is not installed (should come with the drive).
In the case of a burner, you can easily test such an installation by looking at the Windows directory only or the shared docs folder on an XP/Vista system. Otherwise you're crossing the line by examining private data (My Docs is a personal directory placed under "UserName" in both XP and Vista, so any entry into that directory is a violation of the customers expected privacy.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
What is 20 years getting assraped in prison compared to what RIAA wants to do to filesharers?
The difference?
The child pornographer would get repeatedly and endlessly raped for 20 years.
The filesharer would get repeatedly and endlessly raped for 20 years, and the guards would charge the rapists for your time, and split the cash 20/80 with the RIAA.
....Hey, you did ask...
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
One would like to believe it's that easy, but I doubt most people know enough about computing to make decisions so that they can fully control what their computer does. Proprietary software + Internet access can easily equal someone else determining what's on someone's computer. Proprietary software is untrustworthy by default, no amount of testing an executable binary's behavior makes that program trustworthy because the program can be written to do something undesirable after a delay. Other than source code examination, there's no easy way to conclude that a proprietary program isn't going to grant access to someone else who could do computing on your computer without your consent. We can't examine the source code for everything we run, but we can spread out this work so people with those skills have little incentive and opportunity to mess with others. Therefore we all need the freedoms of free software to collectively help one another and get the best chance we're running binaries we can trust.
Digital Citizen
The magical word here is complicity. If you know of a crime and don't report it, you're making yourself a complice.
Now, I store a fair lot of "secret" data on my servers. Not illegal, mind you, but not public either. I'm in IT security, you'll find a fair lot of malware and exploit descriptions on my main server. Some of that information is anything but public knowledge, and giving that to the wrong people could be a disaster. Not only because it could be used, but also for my reputation because someone might find out it was me who leaked this information.
The server is well protected against snooping. Encrypted filesystem, strong security, and you shouldn't plug it to a network that isn't secured against the server. My repair crew has that information and they are instructed NOT to boot the machine past the BIOS and NOT to attach it to any network. So far, they heeded this request, for more than one obvious reason.
First, they like doing business with me. I pay well, and I pay immediately. They're not forensic experts, I would notice if they tried to peek into my system. Second, they get paid to do their work, they don't get paid to look at my system. Simple business interest, there's no money in snooping. Next, "don't ask, don't tell" goes a long way. They don't WANT to look at my system, simply for the complice problem. Even though they couldn't find anything illegal in the system, I'm fairly sure they're convinced they would and they'd have to report it and that means more expense that nobody pays for.
Bottom line: The very LAST thing your repair guys want to deal with is ratting on you. Expense without revenue is what's in it for them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seriously?
You had kiddie porn on your computer and you gave it to circuit city?
you couldn't even put it in a passworded zip or something?
Besides, who even downloads and saves porn anyways? Hasn't this guy heard of the internet? He should be punished for being a total moron
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
Like all things, this can't be a blanket warning - you can't say "tech's can do what they want your computer" (Data Protection Act, etc. would then pretty much mean that you could NEVER use an external tech), and you can't say "tech's can ignore illegal content they find accidentally".
Let's have a car analogy - If you put your car into service, and the garage finds bloodspots in the boot or bits of flesh or a dead body, damn yes they should be calling the cops to take it further. But should they be scraping DNA off the handles and running it through the national databases? No.
If I was to stumble across something illegal, or some outside factor made me suspect, I would expect to be able to use that as evidence. To not be able to because it might invade the person's privacy is stupid. Similarly, allowing me a license to snoop into anything I want just because I've been asked to look at a computer is stupid (much like a garage mechanic pulling your GPS logs from your car and seeing everywhere you've been when you only took it in to change a bulb). And in this case, it's suggested/assumed/proven? that the technician in question was doing things reasonably in line with his job.
Quite often I will open the first document in My Documents, or load up the first image I find in order to check file associations etc. work - I usually ask for an "example" file for the problem that the user then points me to, but if the user isn't around, I have to just pick one at random. Hell, I've searched for "a" in the Find File dialogs before now and then hit the first file that crops up. If I'm restoring backups, or copying files, I *need* to do this to ensure my job was done properly. The tech did nothing wrong here, unless they were snooping into every folder just on the off-chance of finding something. If the customer's manner or the programs installed, or even just a vague hint in an email they happened to flick through while checking the connection worked suggested that illegal content was on the computer, then the tech is in a very tricky position. They can't just ignore the possibility and they can't go reporting grandmas to the police because of a bit of misdirected spam. If the AV finds a virus on a machine in a file named "underage girls" or similar and pops it up in a big red warning message, then that tech HAS to be certain of what that contains. If it's illegal, when he DOES report it the current law in most countries means he'll be crapping himself until the trial in case the police decide to arrest him for having seen it.
As an example that I've dealt with: A staff laptop had a virus. In order to get at the data on the machine, I had to look up the virus details and block its entry points and get a list of files that would be *potentially* infected by it (this was all done on an enclosed system, obviously, but the laptop had been running with the virus for several days). The list of possibly affected files happened to include "randomly-created filenames" in some sub-folders of Windows. When I checked whether they existed, I found a randomly-named subdir with thousands of sub-folders, each with hundreds of large files in. The names of the folders hinted at the sort of illegal activity we're discussing here. In the end, it was actually quite innocent because the folders were Kazaa honey-traps - the virus ran a P2P client and hoped to trick people into downloading copies of itself by putting itself in files/folders named after other things it found on Kazaa (which happened to include some extremely illegal stuff). Do you report that to the police or not? Does a named folder automatically incriminate a user even if they're unaware of its existence? Is it worth wasting police time checking *every* computer that gets that virus for every filename and having it run through a police lab, possibly taking months or years to come back with a result? (Wasting police time is an offence, too, you know).
Everything comes down to "reasonable" behaviour. Is it reasonable for someone who do
I recently caught something online that stated that they had pulled "2 girls and 1 cup" from their site because it was mandated as "Legally Obscene." I assume that means it's not legal to distribute and/or possibly possess
So what happens when the tech catches 2G1C on your desktop (other than the inevitable retching if he watches past the first 5 seconds or so)?
There are plenty of things that might be unexpectedly illegal, or at least apparently so.
Here's a life lesson for everyone. This guy should have taken 30 minutes out of his busy day of jerking off to little kids to learn about encryption. Or better yet, to learn how to install a DVD drive by himself.
But wait, it gets better! If you dig deeper, the offender's name was Kenneth Sodomsky.
Awesome.
Well, it seems to me that the solution would be in this case to charge the guy with the illegal pictures for possession, and charge the tech with some form of trespass or electronic B&E charge.
That should dissuade computer repair guys from rifling through people's computers, but it still allows for the concept that a private citizen is allowed to report things in that manner.
Seems strange that the "fruit of the tainted vine" only applies to cops though, how far is one allowed to go in digging up evidence, and how about if it were submitted anonymously. I remember a case where a judge was nailed on an anonymous tip for having KP. The problem being that the tip was from a guy who "traced and hacked into his computer." So really, it could have been a legit tip, or it could have been a setup on the part of the hacker on what is now essentially a compromised system. Same could apply if your Wal-Mart or Best Buy tech has a grudge against somebody. Not hard to roll back the date on a computer and plant a trail of "evidence".
Would it even be considered "in custody" until the police took it though? Cases where a guy's PC was held by his landlord (after he abandoned a place for several months) and then later given to police for evidence have - I believe - passed through, even though the computer was in the hands of an unknown for several months.
And a landlord who's been shafted on rent might actually have reason to want the suspect nailed...
Let's say the guy had a brief case instead of a computer. Let's say he wanted a new pocket installed inside that would hold photographs. If he had taken the briefcase to the store filled with physical photographs, asking for the pocket to be installed, the leather-worker would certainly have seen them when they opened the briefcase to install the pocket. Would those photographs be admissible in court?
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
is that people actually pay to install a DVD player on a computer?
If you let someone access your information, they can do with it what they want. It seems obvious and self-explanatory to me.
There is another point to this story.
It's easy to say "I'm not doing anything illegal, so I've nothing to hide" but a pc these days is a very private thing, like a diary it can contain all kinds of shameful things, stuff that's not illegal at all but the idea that others can see it can be very unpleasant. Like burglars in your bedroom.
Information about an illness, a money problem, some private photo's of your girlfriend your wife doesn't know about, some documents that could cost your career, etc.
What if a tech support guy notices stuff like this on your pc and shows it to others who bring it in the open, on purpose or not.
Are they prevented to do so in any way? Like a general practitioner who has to swear to keep medical records private?
How will J. Random Tech know the difference between that MP3 that was "pirated" and the one I legally ripped for my own use from CD I purchased?
The exclusionary rule is targeted at government action, not private action. The repair shop wasn't (according to the summary) coerced or otherwise "encouraged" by the government to go through the computer, so the exclusionary rule simply doesn't apply.
Car analogy: You bring your car in the shop for repairs. The shop guys go poking around in the car (perhaps for legitimate reasons, perhaps not) and find your heroin stash. They call the cops. The evidence is admissible.
Car analogy 2: You bring your car in the shop for repairs. The cops call the shop and "suggest" the shop guys search your car for heroin. They find it. The evidence is... well, with the current court it would probably still be admissable, but it probably shouldn't be.
The police were not the ones who illegally searched his computer.
I'm about to have a PC shop remove my heatsink and re-goop my CPU because I don't want the risk of breaking/cracking my CPU on my hands. I'm going to remove my harddrives before I take it to them. My data is *not* their business, whatever it may be (and no, I really don't have any pron on this PC, especially not child pron).
IMHO, you are a stoopid ID10T if you need someone to install software for you. Most sw has very simple instructions for installation PRINTED RIGHT ON THE MEDIA.
How do you know if those images on my HDD are KP unless you look at them.
So erotic pictures of me and my wife (hypothetically speaking, this IS slashdot) and movies we have made of ourselves au naturelle will be looked at by Circuit City apes and tough shit if it breaks a petty law (like, for example, showing me getting a BJ by her while visiting Florida or wherever in the US fellatio is illegal), I will be done for it.
Bollocks.
imagine if they offer a reward to repair techs for information of people who may have "illegally obtained" music or movies. this was not taken up by SCOTUS because most of them are not tech savvy and fail to realize the importance of this.
Or forever, look at how long they took to hear a case about the 2nd amendment... Since they get to pick and choose cases, they have ultimate control of law.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As a techy in Iceland my office has had some incidents of similar nature.
Fortuneatly, Icelandic law states that if child pornography is found the technician is bound by law to inform the police.
they may have pretty free rein in terms of what they're allowed to access on your computer
Actually, this is correct only in terms of criminal liability - since Circuit City wasn't apparently an agent of the government, the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply here. But they may still be liable for a civil suit.
Moral: if you've got stuff on your computer that you'd rather not have others taking a peek at, encryption software is your friend.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
Since you can't prevent them from passing a law,
I meant, since you can't prevent them from breaking a law [preventing illegal searches.]
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
First job out of college, I was an apartment maintenance man. Commonly, people would call in problems and I'd go into their place to fix things during the day while they were at work. I saw all manner of illegal stuff and it never occurred to me to call the police. I've seen coffee tables literally heaped with a kilo of weed in a very neat pyramid, but I'm not a cop and it's not my job to tattle on other folks, so I just forgot about it.
The only time I did anything to change the status quo was when someone was taking action that damaged the property. I was an agent of the property owner, so if you painted your bedroom black (It takes gallons of expensive Killz to cover black well enough to rent the place after you move out) or if you wallpaper your bathroom with porn (I wonder what kind of impression that made on any female houseguests?), it was my job to report and take action.
Sometimes, the action was pretty simple. For example, someone stole most of the furniture from around a pool. A few days later, I got a ticket to fix a leaky faucet. When I went into the apartment, there was our pool furniture, covered with towels, being used as a living room suite. I didn't say anything to anybody; I just put the furniture back out by the pool. Resident was a little sheepish after that.
Nowadays, I fix computers for a living. When I see something dodgy on an employer-owned computer, it's my job to report it. But on those occasions when I've done work for friends, even when I see something that might be dodgy, I don't take the time to look. It's none of my business. I'm not a cop and outside of work, it's not my job to tattle on you.
Now, here's where I get twisted up. What's the legal obligation of someone who sees something on your computer? I would imagine some jurisdictions have tried to make it illegal to look away when you accidentally stumble across something that might, at first glance, seem a bit to young to be doing what they're doing. In fact, wasn't there a law proposed in Texas that would have required all computer repair shops that do file recovery to have an investigator's license issued by the state just so that they'd hove some idea how to maintain a chain of custody and some legal obligation to actually report what they see rather than ignore things (like I used to do?
I'm not sure what the law is, so I don't work for friends ever since my sisters best friends sons computer needed help and I found, in addition to multiple virus infections and no anti-virus software, a large collection of sexually explicit webcam vids he'd made with his contemporaries. (I'm sure they were all over 18 years old, of course. They may have all been freshmen in high school but I keep telling myself that there were all over 18.) I simply don't want to deal with that stuff so I no longer help people who come to me with "My kids computer is really slow; can you help?"
Likewise, if I worked at Best Buy or some such repair depot, there's flat out no way I'd look at anything on the drive I didn't absolutely have to to get the job done. I just don't need the drama in my life.
This kind of thing is why in Texas they may require a PI License for computer techs.
Knowing that I have no expectation of privacy when I send my computer to someone else, I wiped my drive and used the system restore disk when I had to send a laptop back to the company...and that was because I didn't want the techs going through my Quicken files. This loser was doing something he knew was illegal, yet sent it in anyway. Notwithstanding the fact that people who jerk it to kids (creating the market for child porn) deserve to have their genitalia attacked with a weed whacker, the dipshit can't expect constitutional protection from someone who wasn't acting as an agent of the government.
I'll go further. If you download porn binaries from usenet, you almost certainly have child porn on your computer. Point any binary leecher at any large sexually-themed binary newsgroup, mark everything for the last week or two for download, kick it off and go to bed. By morning, you'll have, at minimum, dozens of child porn images from spammers advertising whatever it is they're trying to get you to click on.
and all private and personal information on a usb drive. Have a spare with some innocuous data on it handy in case the man demands your removable drive.
I'm very much in favor of privacy, but there has to be a comon sense rule. We don't want surveillance cameras in the street, but we also can't prohibit people from making photos in public. You don't want neighbours to spy on each other, but you can't stop them from reporting a domestic disturbance if they hear screaming. Fortunately, as far as I am aware the law pretty much does that already. Your privacy is only violated if you have a reasonable expectation of it, and while policemen aren't allowed to invade private homes to seek out crime, they can use evidence they happen on by chance (eg. drug possession after having pulled someone over for speeding).
Circuit City must not routinely search their customers' computers for criminal evidence, but if they find something in the course of their work they should report it. (That goes for criminal evidence, not evidence that could result in a civil suit if passed on.)
I will open a computer repair shop and when you bring your box in, I will sign a confidentiality agreement as well as an agreement promising not to do such snooping.
I'm starting a new project on SourceForge.net, with the aim of writing a bot/worm/rootkit or similar piece of code to accomplish the following: 1) the code installs itself automatically on all public/government computers (meaning court computers, police computers, school computers, military computers and the like) 2) it creates a subfolder named PedophilePr0n somewhere deep down the directory tree 3) it populates the abovesaid subfolder with thousands of child porn photos from the Internet 4) it induces a software error in any mounted CD/DVD drives in order to warrant a visit to the repair shop 5) it does so inadvertently and undetectably, in the sense that there must be no way of determining that all the above steps have not been accomplished by the human user. Preferably, upon completing the above steps, the bot/worm/rootkit should delete all traces of its presence from the computer. The aim of the project is to subvert any government at will, without the need to use obsolete methods and means such as bombs, planes, biochemical weaponry, bomb cars etc. All submissions/ideas welcome! Submit to sourceforge.net, project name "Forget Al-Qaeda!"
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
I have converted all of my porn into stick figures! Who's laughing now buddy?
The love of good Whiskey,Woman,Weed is all i need.
the TSA is still allowed to take your computer into a back room for that air-tight child porn install and frameup.
God Bless America
/sarcasm
I'm one of the people who works both on problem PCs and who supervises others who do.
When working on a PC, "snooping" is the last thing I've got time or interest in doing.
However, if I install or update software (anything from a video editor to the latest version of word) and test it using the "recent files" list, you are crazy if you think I'm not going to call the police if I see something about the user being a terrorist or other kind of a criminal.
For those of you concerned about privacy laws, I think back to when I was in graduate school learning about counseling. A counselor is obligated by law (at least in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey,) to call the authorities if the person being counseled reveals that he or she is contemplating or in the act of harming themselves or others. That applies even after promising confidentiality. (Ignore the misinformation you see so often on TV cop shows.)
I think the same principle applies here. If I work on your PC, I am obligated to keep secret your legitimate business secrets. As a matter of fact, you can and should sue me if I make public that kind of information. But reveal to me that you are a threat to yourself or others and I promise you a call to the authorities.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
So a few years ago the PSU in my Mac G5 died, and it's under warranty. Unfortunately, the only Apple warranty shop around at the time (right after Katrina) was Circuit City. So I go to drop the box off...
Not an hour later I get a call from them telling me they need the passwords to both the admin account and my normal user account, and any other passwords (email, etc) present on the machine. The reason given? The power supply is actually a special piece of software and not a piece of hardware at all!
Obviously I didn't give them this; I wound up driving two hours away to take it to another shop.
I'm so glad that company is dead and gone.
Insert witty
At least, that's the ruling by the appeals court, according to that article. The article makes it sound like, since the tech had been given permission to access the computer as part of the course of doing service for the guy, that the subsequent finding of the materials on the hard drive was not an illegal search. The techs found the evidence *legally*, and once found, they are allowed to voluntarily turn over evidence of a crime to law enforcement.
I believe (though I'm not sure - IANAL), that if private individuals illegally obtain evidence, it would still not be admissible in court, even though it wasn't the police doing the illegal evidence gathering.
This should work in a simple manner, the same way cops ask us questions and can bust us for "lying" even if it's bending the truth and not realizing it's a cop.
The person buying the drugs should ask the seller: "Are you a police officer?" if the seller says no, and then turns out to be a police officer undercover, this case should be thrown out.
And carry a recorder with you for such deals.
I wish it could be this way. Sigh.
What if you started a PC repair company that pledged "We will NEVER use any file from your hard drive during our repair work".
Made that part of the contract the user signs when they drop off the PC. No knowledge, no need to report.
For the car analogy, if the mechanic changes the oil, returns the car to you, never looks at the dead body in the trunk, both you and the mechanic are legally free and clear. Morally, maybe not so, but legally, yes.
Unless the person doing the search has some connection to the authorities, the Fourth Amendment doesn't come into play. A private security guard can tackle you without probable cause, reach into your pocket, grab your contraband, and hand it over to the cops, all is admissible in evidence in your criminal case. See, e.g., In re Christopher H. (Cal. App. 1991) 227 Cal.App.3d 1567.
Nothing to see here, move along.
I have a strong stance that in that the things you use everyday you should be required to understand at least the basic workings of them. This pertains to cars, phones, computers, tools, etc.
If you are going to use it, at least know how it works!
It depends on a lot of things in computer repair. I work with a large computer repair company. In the case of doing work on a machine, where a DVD install was done, the owner probably Windows Media Player as the default DVD player. In a lot of cases, units will autorun the DVD - but in certain cases you may have to go to the disc through "menu" in the menu bar. WMP ALWAYS has a "recently opened" list of movies, and sounds. One time that got me busted in a relationship since the GF was against the idea of Porn (degrading to women, men, animals - blah, blah, blah). The Firedog guys probably saw it and saw file name "14 year old (insert filth here)" and had to report it to a supervisor. That is normally the case. Geek Squad has a clause in the terms and conditions that says when CP is found, they will hand the unit over to the police. Circuit City/Firedog probably had the same thing.
In cases where I've come across something (and people - not A person - have left the files on the DESKTOP) I have contacted police.
It always depends on the situation and what is being done, but I don't go searching for it. IF it is found, that unit is now in local law enforcements hands.
The problem is there is a mass global rebellion to copyright laws....
Have to do with this:
So... it's bad that you can be caught breaking the law? Maybe not breaking the law would be better then complaining about the cops being able to catch you?
Maybe we should declare a Godwin style law, only related to copyrights.
As a member of the ACLU
So you support the American Communist Lawyer's Union?
*selects troll*
*clicks mouse*
^_^
It's easy to talk about it afterwords but when you're sitting in front of a computer while working on it and you come across items like that it can be devastating.
I do spyware removal. While this is obviously more involved than installing a DVD drive it still carries the need to take a look at the Hard drive- not snooping, but spending time cleaning up all the obnoxious places that these files might resolve. While doing so and trying to delete a folder that had been flagged with malware in it I clicked in, only to find a load of chat records (and by load I mean over 20,000 files). Included in there were videos, photos, and descriptions which I never usually pay attention to.
This time I did. I wanted to puke after seeing what I saw. I agonized weeks before taking action... and even then I didn't call in the FBI. I should have. It was my Sister-in-Law's computer- her husband had done it. So I told her... and she apparently has done nothing.
It's easy to debate about things in the abstract sense and taking the high moral ground is perfectly fine. However until you've looked through the eyes and seen what those words mean... please do not judge so harshly.
I accidentally said that baby bathtime pictures do not fall under the BGH definition of "not obscene". Of course that's wrong. They do fall under the definition and are thus not obscene.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I agree the guy should go to jail, but this is a slippery slope if I ever heard one... He gave the Circuit City guys permission to install a DVD drive, NOT to F'ing access every file on his computer. FFS
There is no proof that between the time the computer was handed in, and the technician discovered the files, that the system was never out of his hands, and that one or other at his employment deposited the files therein.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Ever heard of Truecrypt or FreeOTFE? Yeah, too late for this fool