The Eleventh Circuit recently decided an interesting case applying the Fourth Amendment to computer networks, United States v. King. The question: If a person connects his machine to a computer network, and he unknowingly is sharing the contents of the machine with the rest of the network, does he retain Fourth Amendment protection in the inadvertently exposed contents?
First, the facts. King was a civilian contractor who worked at a U.S. Air Force base in Saudi Arabia. He often connected to the base network using his personal laptop computer. Unbeknownst to him, his laptop was configured to “share” its contents with the entire network. One day, an enlisted man was searching the network for music files when he came across King’s computer; he noticed that the computer contained adult pornography. The enlisted man reported this to another government employee, who conducted a similar remote search and found an empty folder in King’s computer called “pedophilia.” The government obtained a warrant to search King’s computer at the air force base based on this evidence, and they found child pornography on his machine.
King then filed a motion to suppress on the ground that the initial remote search of his computer was an unlawful search in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Eleventh Circuit rejected the argument in a per curiam opinion (Pryor, Carnes, and Anderson on the panel) reasoning that King did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the files he had exposed to the rest of the network:
King has not shown a legitimate expectation of privacy in his computer files. His experience with computer security and the affirmative steps he took to install security settings demonstrate a subjective expectation of privacy in the files, so the question becomes