{"id":222098,"date":"2026-03-10T16:52:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T20:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/10\/court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T16:55:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T20:55:10","slug":"court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/10\/court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling\/","title":{"rendered":"Court touts digital privacy rights, yet upholds NC child porn ruling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wbt.com\/1642186\/court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling\/\">Court touts digital privacy rights, yet upholds NC child porn ruling<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wbt.com\/1642186\/court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling\/\">https:\/\/wbt.com\/1642186\/court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-10 16:52:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"wbt.com\">wbt.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Image by Daniel Agrelo from Pixabay<\/p>\n<p>The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a child pornography conviction in a North Carolina case, despite rejecting the trial judge\u2019s rulings about the defendant\u2019s privacy rights.<\/p>\n<p>The decision Tuesday affirms an eight-year prison sentence and 20 years of supervised release for defendant Nico Aaron Lowers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt 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,\u201d wrote Appeals Court Judge Stephanie Thacker. \u201cThe district court below held that Nico Lowers (\u2018Appellant\u2019) had no expectation of privacy in the files he uploaded to his private Google Drive account, files that contained child sexual abuse material (\u2018CSAM\u2019). Therefore, the court denied Appellant\u2019s motion to suppress the evidence of conviction that flowed from law enforcement\u2019s warrantless search of those files.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe reject the district court\u2019s proffered reasons for so holding,\u201d Thacker added. \u201cJust 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\u2019s files, we hold that this was an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yet the court did not throw out Lowers\u2019 conviction.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-ione-newsletter-sign-up__heading\">\n\t\t\t\t\tLove WBT Charlotte&#8217;s News Talk? Get more! Join the WBT Charlotte&#8217;s News Talk Newsletter\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-ione-newsletter-sign-up__privacy\">\n\t\t\t\t\tWe care about your data. See our privacy policy.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat constitutional violation notwithstanding, we nevertheless agree with the district court\u2019s alternative holding that suppression is unwarranted because the causal&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wbt.com\/1642186\/court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Court touts digital privacy rights, yet upholds NC child porn ruling https:\/\/wbt.com\/1642186\/court-touts-digital-privacy-rights-yet-upholds-nc-child-porn-ruling\/ Publish Date: 2026-03-10&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":222099,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.carolinajournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/computer-keyboard-768x432.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222100,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222098\/revisions\/222100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}