This week, the Ninth and Tenth Circuits have each decided interesting cases on how the Fourth Amendment applies when a person hooks up their personal computer to a government-owned computer network, leading to a search of the personal computer by a government official. I’d like to blog about both opinions at length, because there is a lot here — some of it right, some of it a bit off. But in the meantime I’ll just note the opinions: United States v. Heckencamp (college student connects to college network; retains REP in his computer, but remote search by university system administrator okay under “special needs” exception) (hat tip: Tom Cross); United States v. Barrows (town government employee who brought computer to work and connected it to townn’s internal network on permanent basis lost reasonable expectation of privacy in machine’s contents). Very interesting cases.