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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."
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
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
No they wouldn't have been, because there is nothing about this case that is legally novel or particularly controversial. The techs were not state actors (meaning working for the government either officially or at the direction of somebody from the government). Therefore, the 4th amendment rights to protection from unreasonable search & seizure do NOT apply (notice how I'm NOT talking about expectation of privacy... you don't even get to that issue when there's no state action).
There have been cases in the past where criminals have broken into people's houses and stole items that prove crimes (like say papers proving bank fraud or something like that). Later when the cops bust them and recover the items, those papers were completely valid as evidence against the original owners of the papers, even though the police would have needed a warrant to get the papers if they had conducted a direct search & seizure. If a criminal breaking into your house doesn't count as state action, then voluntarily handing over your computer to techs who are supposed to know how to fix the computer is not the brightest move.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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.
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).
As someone who has worked PC repair for ages (as my oldest says "when dinosaurs roamed the earth) allow me to enlighten the childrens here. First i have been buds with some best buy guys over the years, and I have known a few that kept external drives with .BAT files that would trawl your drive for .jpg, .avi, etc. Are you gonna trust that guy not to fuck up and drop something off of said drive while he is looking for files to steal? It is like asking the guy robbing your house not to drop crumbs on your carpet.
Second, I can tell you from experience working on clients computers that there is some seriously nasty malware out there that will do all kinds of nasty shit to your PC, including leaving nice backdoors where Mr. Malware writer can go in and pretty much do anything he wants. I have also seen clickjack bugs that will open up 20+ windows at a time to many different topsites INCLUDING those that advertise child pron. Now according to the law that person could be rotting in jail now for having a bug. Now you may get cleared later but after how much money? What if you don't have the cash for a good lawyer?
That is why my customers can bring their PC to me without fear. Because unless they tell me to go into the My Documents folder I ain't going there. I am working with the desktop and the system32 folder and that's it. That "I needed data to burn" bullshit is just that. The geek squad guys have piles of CDs and flash drives lying around just like I do. When I need to test a burner I simply use the software CD that came with it, or drag my repair tools folder off my flash. But trust me, anybody who has worked PC repair for any length of time knows that story is bullshit. I have known so many guys with porta drives filled with other folks stuff that it ain't even funny.
Have I worked on somebody's PC in the past that may or may not had kiddie porn? Probably but I wouldn't have known because I don't go looking for stuff to steal. To me it is like the guy that comes in to spray your apartment looking through your underwear drawer. It ain't my job to be an undercover for the cops. I just fix the box and hand it back, which is what the geek squad guys SHOULD be doing but I can tell you from talking to quite a few ain't the case. And I think that is the heart of the matter. You know the geek squad guy was stealing, I know the geek squad guy was stealing, hell I'm sure the cops knew it to. letting the geek squad guys steal whatever they want as long as they are good snitches is bullshit and we all know it. But as long as the courts let them get away with it they'll keep right on loading their hard drives. It isn't like Best Buy corp is gonna give a fuck if they help themselves as long as your check clears.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.