best buy's geek squad finds child porn on janitor's computer, janitor arrested.
obviously child porn is bad and the guy should have been arrested. but do you think that the geek squad also violated the law by snooping? i think so. think about it. if the police can't even search your house witout a warrant (which they get after supposedly demonstrating that they have a good reason to search your house) then how can the geek squad randomly search thru your stuff?
if you read the wiki article you should've noticed part where if a person gives consent, there is no need for a search warrant. but does handing over your hard drive to be fixed mean that you're giving permission for them to search the whole thing? i think not. the geek on that squad should be punished if they can't show that they had a legitimate reason for looking thru that part of the hard drive.
some people might argue that, but really now. imagine this: a person breaks into your house and has already loaded up their car wit all your stuff. you come home and suffer a heart attack (maybe because of the shock of finding them, maybe not). they call the paramedics who come and rescue you. they later tell you that witout that burglar calling 911, you would've been dead. does that mean that you should no longer press charges for trespassing, breaking and entering, and theft? i don't think so. just cause they did a good deed does not mean that they didn't break the law in the first place. (and yes, i realize this analogy doesn't work perfectly wit the best buy situation, but this analogy isn't for that).
3 comments:
I think its similar to:
you're a plumber, and you go to someones house to fix something, and so you need to go to another part of the house to see some pipes or something and you find dead bodies stored there...
The REAL problem I see with this though..
is that the guy sent it in for DATA RECOVERY. That's not always a "just run a program on it and its done." Most of the time the hard drive can only recover partial filenames and its upto the user/geek squad guy to complete the filename. So in those instances of "7yearoldgirln?ked.jpg".. is that invasion of privacy? The guy asked for it to be recovered.
Of course, this isn't necessarily exactly what happened, but from my experience with data recovery, that actually IS how it is most of the time.
While I understand your point, I also understand rip's, and i agree with rips. wow.
that's gotta be a first...
see, but that's why i was careful to say that they should only be "punished if they can't show that they had a LEGITIMATE reason." i think the plumber analogy is a really good one (but again, i wasn't using my burglar one in comparison to the best buy situation), but we're assuming a lot in each analogy. maybe the files were named something like "famxmas02". so that's like the plumber finding the dead bodies in a closet of a room he shouldn't have been in the first place. which would mean that he was snooping.
but if homeboy pedophile was stupid enough to keep the file name "7yearoldgirln?ked.jpg" and if THOSE were the files he was hoping to get recovered, then holy smokes he deserves jail and worse.
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