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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."
"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
Yeah, the real message is that you just don't hand you collection of illegal images over to anyone if you don't want them found.
Like, if you have to go to the police station to bail out a friend, leave your drugs at home. These things are common sense.
Also this guy should rot in jail.
You know, you could always choose NOT to have child pornography on your computer.
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
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.
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.
I'd say it's more like the mechanic would rip open the door or dashboard to find drugs, when he was supposed to replace the brakepads.
Dead guy in the trunk is like putting child porn as the desktop wallpaper.
Yeah, the real message is that you just don't hand you collection of illegal images over to anyone if you don't want them found.
You're assuming that "illegal images" is a cut and dry term. Not anymore. Have some myspace photos of your young looking friend in just her underwear? A "jailbait" inspirational photo in your picture folder as a joke? Manga which might be considered obscene?
No matter how innocuous you may think your hard drive is, if you are a heavy internet user there's a chance there's something on there that someone might consider child porn.
> Yeah, the real message is that you just don't hand you collection of illegal images over to anyone if you don't want them found.
There's a secondary message in this story, and it doesn't apply just to computers. If you're going to use a piece of equipment for illegal activities, you'd better be able to maintain that equipment yourself. Every time someone else gets access to that equipment, you run the risk of getting caught.
I'd say it's more like the mechanic would rip open the door or dashboard to find drugs, when he was supposed to replace the brakepads.
Dead guy in the trunk is like putting child porn as the desktop wallpaper.
I know nothing about the case. I know even less about car repair. However...
The fine summary is a little vague on the work that was actually done. It says they were "installing a DVD player."
If they were simply installing a piece of software to play DVDs, they probably wouldn't need to go snooping through his HDD to test it. But lots of media playback software tries to do friendly things like scanning your drive for media it can play. So the DVD player software might very well have done just that, and come up with the movie in question.
If they were installing a more general-purpose piece of software for playing back all sorts of media - VLC for example - they might very well have gone looking for a movie on his HDD to test. Depending on the hardware/software used to create a movie it can be in all sorts of different formats... And I've had clients come back and complain because we didn't associate the right filetype for their specific videos. So I always make a point of taking a quick look in My Documents to make sure everything is associated correctly.
If they were installing hardware, like a DVD drive, then they might very well have tested its burning capabilities. I'll routinely do that here at work. I've got a CD-R/W and a DVD-R/W that I carry around for just that purpose. I'll pop the disc in, grab something random off the desktop or My Documents, and try to burn it. Again, a good opportunity to stumble across something unsettling.
Again, I don't know anything about this case. Maybe the guy was just snooping. But maybe he wasn't. I know I've stumbled across some images on client drives that I wish I hadn't... Nothing illegal, that I noticed, but some stuff I really didn't need to see.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Have any naked baby photos of your kids? Remember the mother who got arrested at Wal-Mart after taking such photos to be developed?
This sort of thing isn't nearly as black and white as it is made to seem. Child pornography is a really HORRIBLE thing, and people who create it should be castrated, and people who DESIRE it need to be put into an asylum for psychological treatment. But I just pointed out something that could be subjectively called "child pornography" that probably in in the possession of the majority parents out there...
Hell, I always HATED it when I was a kid and at the family gatherings my mom and grandparents would inevitably drag out my baby pictures... To me, that was annoying. To some freak in law enforcement who's out there trolling the `net trying to entice people to download his government sanctified stash of child porn so they can "bust" them, they were guilty of creating and disseminating child porn...
Corporatism != Free Market
If they are important they get a slap on the wrist. Termination is only for you peons, it's how capitalism works! Love it or leave it.
There is a big difference between seeing drugs on the back seat, or a dead body inside the car, and reporting that, and reporting on drugs found under the carpet in the trunk or in the glovebox if the car was brought in for an oil change...
The mechanic would have had no reasonable need to have searched those two areas to perform the job he was hired to do. Same with a PC tech, if someone brings in a PC to have a CD-ROM drive replaced, there is absolutely NO REASON for the tech to need to search the browser cache or the images directory...
Now, I know, it's a rite of passage thing. We've ALL done it, looked at a customer's PC to see what pr0n he has.. In my case I was permanently cured of that the first time I found GAY pr0n, not the good kind, ie: girl on girl, the OTHER kind :)
But still, I shouldn't have done that then, and techs hired to replace a bad CD drive shouldn't be doing that NOW.
I know nothing about the case. I don't know what they found or where it was hidden. I don't know if they had to brute-force decrypt some huge stash of pornography, or if they just tripped over it. So I'm not defending anyone at this point.
But there's a big difference between whether they should have been snooping in the first place, and whether what they found should be admissible in court.
If someone breaks into my house planning to rob me blind, but finds I've got several dead people stashed in my basement, should that be admissible? Should he be able to go to the police and say "hey, this guy's got corpses in his basement!" And if he does so, should that be admissible in a court case against me? Or should that all be thrown out because he shouldn't have been in my house in the first place?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
That's almost a good analogy, but what happened in this case, is the mechanic opened the truck and went looking around, when all he was supposed to do was to change the headlight.
That's still not quite right. Here's the better analogy:
You bring your car(computer) to the mechanic, because you need new tires(DVD drive and accompanying software). But, you've left your stash of CP in the trunk(My Documents folder). The mechanic, instead of using his own tire iron(media files to test newly installed software) to remove the lug nuts, opens your trunk to get your's(media files already present on your hard drive), and finds the CP. Now, that's the relevant car analogy.
The relevant portion of the tech's testimony can be found in the appellate court's ruling (pages 3-4)
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
The OP did say "arrested" and not "convicted." I don't know about you, but my life would be hell on earth for those fifteen months. And probably for a long time thereafter, too, as idiots remember the arrest, and not the dropping of the charges for being stupid.
The power to arrest comes with some very serious responsibilities. The police, evidently, aren't aware of that. What I'm wondering isn't why the officer in this case arrested the woman ("stupidity" explains that in a population size of one), but why his/her superior was okay with it. Someone wasn't doing their job, and BOTH of them should be fired with extreme prejudice for simple incompetence.
Of course, I'm also wondering why it took the prosecutors 15 months to drop a case that 30 minutes of investigation could show was inept (drive to her granddaughter's house and verify the girl there matches the picture). There should have been heads rolling in the prosecutor's office, too, though I'll admit to not knowing if this was the case (I doubt it, though - I just don't trust the gubmint to get this right).
The problem is there is a mass global rebellion to copyright laws. You saw that over in Sweden where a previously unknown and niche party managed to get EU representation. You see it on /. on TPB, all over the internet. Its about as unpopular as prohibition was.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Wow. It was a picture of a kid in a bathtub. You think all bathtub photos of children should be investigated by the police? People like you frighten me more than "creepy neighbor #4".