In United States v. Busby, the defendant's employer noticed that the computer assigned to him was performing searches such as "young-angels" and downloading torrents like "Pthc-Russia10Yo-11Yo-Little-Brother-And-Sister-2BoyGirls-Fucking-Just-Posing-Or-Naked-Pthc-R." 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 145217 (N.D. Cal. 2011). The employer contacted the police and the laptop was seized. The following day, a search warrant was obtained for the defendant's residence because the laptop had also been used at the defendant's home and contained images "of females in their mid-to-late-teens posing in a sexually suggestive manner." The defendant was also registered as a sex offender.
The court found that while the defendant may have had a subjective expectation of privacy in the laptop, he had signed a policy stating that "[u]sers have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy" in the laptop. Thus, the employer's consent to search and seize the laptop was permissible. The search of the defendant's home, however, was unconstitutional and warranted suppression of evidence. The websites visited were only suspected of containing child pornography, but as the court pointed out, the photos in question may have been of young adults (18 or 19 years old) and not child pornography. Further, the fact that he was a registered sex offender does not help establish probable cause under these facts.
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