Ends don’t justify means, do they?
April 11, 2008
If a good Samaritan returns a misplaced laptop to a police station so its owner can claim it, is it really necessary or appropriate for the police to snoop through all of the data in the hope of finding porn?
I’m sure that there’s no actual Fourth Amendment protection in these circumstances, but it does seem rather rude for the police to search stuff without probable cause.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Could be worse. Could’ve been Whitewater and they could have been searching for blogging activity.
April 12th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I’m not familiar with the reference.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
http://www.madison.com/wsj/topstories/277169
The police chief in Whitewater, WI used city resources in an effort to identify a local blogger critical of his office. The State Journal broke the story, and it made national news.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Ah, thanks. Seems to me that exposing public officials who are behaving like that is one of the great benefits of local bloggers.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:51 am
“is it really necessary or appropriate for the police to snoop through all of the data in the hope of finding porn?”
Ha. All I can hear is a reporter noting, “It was unclear what the rope was for.”
Then we could talk about the Texas travesty. Cops abusing power? Who knew.
May 4th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Hey ben did you every think maybe the guy had folders on his desktop that said porn or something maybe they just turned it on to find out who it belonged to and woah there it is.