A Pennsylvania man learned the hard way that you have no right to privacy when your computer is repaired.
On October 15, 2004, Kenneth Sodomsky brought his computer to a Circuit City store in Pennsylvania. When he arrived, he asked store technicians to install a DVD burner in it.
To test operation of the burner, an employee searched for video files. According to the employee's court testimony, the titles found included, "ages of either 13 or 14, and sexual acts." After confirming that one of the video files was, in fact, pornographic, the employee contacted the store manager, who contacted the police.
Police obtained a search warrant to search the PC and confirmed the presence of child pornography. On Dec. 5, 2007, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the search and seizure procedure used in this case. Sodomsky now faces criminal charges for possession of child pornography.
According to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, when Sodomsky took his computer to Circuit City, he "abandoned" it. Under the legal theory of "abandonment," you relinquish any expectation of privacy in the abandoned item. If the person you leave your property with decides to turn it over to police, you have no right to object.
Many other states have similarly expansive views of abandonment. Basically, it means you should NEVER turn any property over to another person if there is even the slightest chance that there might be something potentially incriminating on it. (The U.S. Supreme Court has declared the same principle applies to trash set out for collection.)
If Sodomsky had taken the simple precaution of encrypting or otherwise restricting his files, the result might have been different. Since the files weren't encrypted, the Circuit City employee wasn't undertaking a "fishing expedition" by conducting an automatic search for video files in order to test the burner's installation.
However, even with encryption, the result might have been the same if Circuit City technicians had found evidence of viewing child porn in Sodomsky's "cache" files. These are the files automatically created by an Internet browser or ancillary software of images previously viewed.
Pennsylvania, and several other states, have ruled that merely viewing child pornography is enough to be convicted of possessing it—even if the images aren't intentionally saved.
And here is where the real danger lies. Every day, billions of spam messages promoting pornographic Web sites are sent to millions of e-mail addresses—perhaps yours. If you view any of these messages, the images they contain will automatically be stored in your Internet cache. And that's sufficient evidence for you to be thrown in jail.
How do you protect yourself? Besides avoiding pornographic sites--particularly those that could be construed as promoting child pornography--the most basic precaution is to turn off disk caching—click here to learn how.
In addition, before you take in your PC for repairs, sell it, or give it away, be certain that it's not hiding any compromising content somewhere. Among other precautions, that means you should defragment your hard drive, securely delete any unneeded files (using a program such as PGP), and wipe "free disk space" to make sure incompletely deleted files are, in fact, deleted.
I can't promise these precautions will remove every trace of pornography from your PC that you may have unintentionally viewed. But they will go a long way toward proving that you had absolutely no intention of "possessing" child porn.
Copyright © 2008 by Mark Nestmann
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