{"id":8004,"date":"2012-11-27T08:25:14","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T00:25:52","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T08:47:06","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=8004","title":{"rendered":"D.N.M.I.: No standing in a school computer appropriated to view child porn"},"content":{"rendered":"

An FBI agent stationed in Saipan installed spyware on a computer given his child by his school so he could monitor the computer. When he learned he was being stationed to the mainland and the computer was going back to the school, he had the computer wiped clean by a service tech, but the spyware survived. A while after the computer was returned to the school, he again received emails about the use of the computer visiting child pornography websites, and he turned this information over to the FBI in Saipan. The court discusses at length whether a search occurred and whether it was a government search, but it ultimately decides the defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a school computer that was for the use of students. [Really interesting analysis.] United States v. Weindl, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 166733 (D. N.M.I. November 20, 2012) (not yet on court’s website<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Even if Weindl had a subjective (albeit unrealistic) expectation of privacy in the PSS laptop, it was not an expectation that society is prepared to endorse. An expectation of privacy does not become objectively reasonable just because a person hides someone else’s property away in his office desk and does not let anyone else use it. A person cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a computer he stole or obtained by fraud. See United States v. Wong, 334 F.3d 831, 839 (9th Cir. 2003) (stolen laptop); United States v. Caymen, 404 F.3d 1196, 1201 (9th Cir. 2005) (fraudulently obtained laptop). In Caymen, police got a warrant to seize from the defendant a laptop suspected to have been obtained through credit card fraud. Caymen, 404 F.3d at 1197. After the seizure, they discovered that the defendant had a prior conviction for possession of child pornography. Id. at 1198. They then conducted a warrantless search of the laptop’s hard drive, ostensibly looking for evidence of credit card fraud, and instead found sexually explicit images of children. Id. The defendant moved to suppress the images, and the motion was denied on grounds that the defendant lacked Fourth Amendment standing. Id. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed. It found that “one who takes property by theft or fraud cannot reasonably expect to retain possession and exclude others from it once he is caught. Whatever expectation of privacy he might assert is not a legitimate expectation that society is prepared to honor.” Id. at 1201.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}