# Hack My Son's Computer, Please



## Clark Kent (May 24, 2007)

*Hack My Son's Computer, Please
By ping898 - Fri, 25 May 2007 01:50:36 GMT
Originally Posted at: Nephrites Citadel*
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http://www.wired.com/politics/law/co...cuitcourt_0523

Though I abhor Child porn and think it is disgusting, I have to admit, I agree with the defendant in this one...


 	Quote:
 	 	 		 			 			 				Can an elderly father give police permission to search a password-protected computer kept in his adult son's bedroom, without probable cause or a warrant? In April, a three judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said yes.
This week, the son's attorney, Melissa Harrison, an assistant federal public defender in Kansas City, will ask the court to reconsider the panel's ruling. At stake is whether law enforcement will have any responsibility to respect passwords and other expressions of user privacy when searching devices which contain the most sensitive kinds of private information. 
....
The suspect was not at home. However, his 91-year-old father answered the door in his pajamas, invited the agents in, and eventually gave them permission to enter his son's bedroom and search the hard drive on his son's password-protected computer. The agents used EnCase to perform the search, a common forensic tool programmed to ignore Windows logon passwords. Agents found child pornography on the computer. 
Without a judge's permission, the search depended on the father's authority to allow police access to his son's computer. On this point, the fact that the son locked his parents out of the computer with a password is critical.
....
In this case, the defendant could not have done much more to keep his computer private, other than tape a piece of paper to the monitor like a teenager might post on the door to his room (Do Not Enter Or Else!!). On the other hand, the officers could have simply asked the father whether he had permission to access his son's computer, switched the computer on to see if there was a password prompt, or used a forensic program that notifies investigators when a machine is password protected. It's as if the police entered the defendant's room with x-ray specs on and searched his bureau, closet and footlocker without needing to even ask his father whether these things were private or shared. 
The Supreme Court expressly disavowed this technique in Kyllo v. United States, where it held that "obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical 'intrusion into a constitutionally protected area,' constitutes a search -- at least where ... the technology in question is not in general public use." 
If courts are going to treat computers as containers, and if owners must lock containers in order to keep them private from warrantless searches, then police should be required to look for those locks. Password protected computers and locked containers are an inexact analogy, but if that is how courts are going to do it, then its inappropriate to diminish protections for computers simply because law enforcement chooses to use software that turns a blind eye to owners' passwords. 			 			 		 	 	 



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