Court touts digital privacy rights, yet upholds NC child porn ruling

Source Domain: wbt.com

Image by Daniel Agrelo from Pixabay

The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a child pornography conviction in a North Carolina case, despite rejecting the trial judge’s rulings about the defendant’s privacy rights.

The decision Tuesday affirms an eight-year prison sentence and 20 years of supervised release for defendant Nico Aaron Lowers.

“At its core, this case requires us to decide whether the privacy expectations guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment apply with equal force in the digital world,” wrote Appeals Court Judge Stephanie Thacker. “The district court below held that Nico Lowers (‘Appellant’) had no expectation of privacy in the files he uploaded to his private Google Drive account, files that contained child sexual abuse material (‘CSAM’). Therefore, the court denied Appellant’s motion to suppress the evidence of conviction that flowed from law enforcement’s warrantless search of those files.”

“We reject the district court’s proffered reasons for so holding,” Thacker added. “Just as Americans enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in files maintained in a filing cabinet in the physical world, so too, Americans enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in the digital files they place in cloud based storage accounts. Law enforcement cannot open and view those private files without first securing a warrant. Because law enforcement here failed to secure a warrant before opening Appellant’s files, we hold that this was an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Yet the court did not throw out Lowers’ conviction.

“That constitutional violation notwithstanding, we nevertheless agree with the district court’s alternative holding that suppression is unwarranted because the causal…

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