FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS SEARCHES OF CAMPUS COMPUTERS ARE LEGAL

U.S. District Court Judge D. Brock Hornby ruled in June that the right to privacy does not extend to information stored on public computers at colleges and universities. In the case in question, University of Southern Maine student Frederick W. Butler Jr. was charged following the discovery of child pornography on public computers he had used at the university.

Butler said the university's search of the computers' records was a violation of his rights under the Fourth Amendment, but Hornby ruled that Butler never had a reasonable expectation that the records were or would be private. George Washington University professor of law Jeffrey Rosen agreed with the decision though he expressed concern over its implications. "If the computers are being made available to everyone, [university officials] wouldn't even have to warn that they were monitoring before they could install tracking software."