The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California, has ruled that an employee who was accused of receiving child pornography had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his use of a workplace computer.
The case involved Jeffrey Ziegler, who was the director of operations for Frontline Processing, a Montana company that services Internet merchants. Frontline’s internet service provider notified the FBI that child-porn websites had been accessed on a Frontline computer. Then, in connection with an FBI investigation into the matter, Frontline confirmed that the offending sites were accessed from a computer in Ziegler’s office at the company. Frontline turned Ziegler’s computer, along with backups of the hard drive, over to the FBI, which discovered many pornographic images of children on the computer.
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After Ziegler was indicted on several counts of receiving and possessing child pornography, he argued that evidence obtained from the search of this workplace computer should be suppressed. In particular, he contended, the FBI, lacking a warrant, violated the Fourth Amendment by directing Frontline employees to search his computer.
But the Ninth Circuit rejected Ziegler’s argument: “The record evidence in this case establishes that the workplace computer was company-owned; Frontline’s computer policy included routine monitoring, a right of access by the employer, and a prohibition against private use by its employees. As such, Ziegler had no objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in his workplace computer and thus no standing to invoke Fourth Amendment protection.”
We’ll have more on this development in an upcoming issue of the California Employer Advisor.
Additional Resources:
“Electronic Monitoring: Employer Had Duty to Investigate Employee’s Criminal Online Activities; 3 Protection Steps,” in the April 2006 issue of the California Employer Advisor