Article: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules exception to Fourth Amendment

[Shawn]

The more important piece of this article is the ruling of the 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that counter-hacks are allowed under
the 'special needs' exception to the Fourth Amendment. This, in turn,
allowed for a warrantless search to be upheld which lead to the
conviction.

Story:
"The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in the case of Jerome
Heckenkamp, the former University of Wisconsin student convicted of
federal computer crime charges in 2004 after hacking into Qualcomm,
Cygnus Solutions and other companies, and defacing eBay. Heckenkamp
was caught after a system administrator at the university hacked into
his Linux box to gather evidence that Heckenkamp had been attacking
the college mail server. The court ruled today that such counter-hacks
are allowable under the 'special needs' exception to the Fourth
Amendment, and upheld the warrantless search."

Full story here:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/06/1420227&from=rss

Shawn