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No Warrant Needed To Search Work PC
from the makes-sense dept
A Washington State court has ruled that police do not need a search warrant to search an office computer, if the company that owns those computers agrees. The case concerned an employee of an organization who was arrested for accessing child porn via his work computers. Apparently, the police approached the company and asked for access to the employees computers, which was granted, despite them not having a search warrant. This seems perfectly reasonable, and the court agreed. The company owned the computers, so it seems perfectly sensible that they should be allowed to let the police access them, should they choose to do so. Of course, some employees may not be thrilled to find out their employers are willing to roll over even when not presented with official documents, but that's a different discussion.
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Seems Reasonable
The ruling seems so obvious as to be ridiculous. Only a moron would store child porn on a computer at work (both because of what happened and because of sexual harassment laws).
I can only imagine this was the perp's attempt at a Hail Mary to get key evidence thrown out. And, like most Hail Marys, it failed.
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Re: Seems Reasonable
Seems there's a lot of morons out there.
Our networking dept does yearly audits of our NETWORK PUBLIC drives to free up space and almost every year, around 20% of it is PORN...and these aren't personal machines...these are user directories that are shared and accessible by anyone.
We seem to have, as a society, developped extremely POOR impulse control...I mean, porn at work...porn in CARS...porn on the cellphone..WTF? What kind of losers are these people?
There's nothing wrong with porn..but there's a time and a place you know?
SIGH. Thank god there has been no word of CHILD porn found at least...
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Re: Seems Reasonable
Thecaptain,
WELL SAID !
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Re: Seems Reasonable
20% of your network public drives?!?!
or like 20% of jpegs or something?
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Re: Seems Reasonable
no..20% of the SPACE...avis, mpegs, you name it.
and we're talking gigs here.
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