So the police should just raid people's houses at random and postal workers should go through people's mail just to check nothing dodgy is going on there?
This is a strawman argument and you know it. Nobody ever said this.
Privacy is an integral part of having a free society. You'd probably have to go through thousands of people's files before happening on kiddy porn.
There are two things here. First, there is the fact that the way some of those people store files there is absolutely no need to snoop; sometimes they are sitting, right there on the desktop. I agree that there is an ethical obligation to a persons privacy when you are fixing their machine, but a responsible tech is going to be sifting through files anyway- either they will appear in various logs during a scan, or they will show up in various directories. I know people who "hide" files in C:\windows\System32 because they don't think anybody would look there for their private things. So at that point the question is that if a person or tech finds illegal material in this manner, do they have an obligation to essentially conspire with the perpetrator in the interest of their privacy, or do they have an obligation to report the offense in the interest of society. In my opinion the question essentially answers itself.
It's akin to a person being hired to clean a bathtub having to "respect" a clients privacy when they have to clean lye and blood stains off of a bathtub. While the skilled perpetrators of murders will know to either clean the mess up themselves, so too do the major-league perpetrators of Internet crime know how to clean up their own messes. By that account the only kind of crimes that will be found by techs on peoples computers are going to be from the stupid ones.
I'm not of course arguing that they should be looking around on a computer with the specific purpose of snooping. In fact that is quite reprehensible, since they have a job to do, and more importantly the mickey mouse operations that do this usually just reformat and reinstall windows anyway so they wouldn't be encountering files "by accident" anyway.
In this case, however, we have a rented computer- for all we know, the rental agreement of the computer has information that indicates that all activity will be tracked. It might not say how or when, but if that is in there than it would be downright stupid to do what was indicates. Arguably it's stupid to do that in front of a computer anyway because.. well actually I'm surprised I feel compelled to even think up a reason here.
Most child pornography viewers and producers get caught on their own without the assistance of a computer tech.
Probably true, but not much of a counterargument. That would be like saying that Most terrorists don't get caught at border crossings, and using that as evidence that the borders of a country should be completely open and unchecked. (But how then would we Canadians keep our moose pelts from crossing South of the Border?)
Saying there's a benefit to flagrantly and continually violating people's privacy is like saying, "look, I know robbing your house may have not been the nicest thing to do but I mean, what would happen if I hadn't told you about the poor pipe installation I found? I mean, you would have had a catastrophic leak!"
This is not what I think to be an accurate analogy. An analogy would be more akin to a Tenant telling a landlord about a problem, and the landlord comes to fix it while they are away, and then the landlord goes through their stuff and stumbles upon something illegal.
The fact is that nothing has really changed. There are people that are going to snoop through other peoples stuff given the opportunity and the high probability of not getting caught doing so. Arguing that because this is present with Computers that the entire domestic scene has suddenly changed to one that embraces voyeur attitudes is to exercise one's skills in hyperbole. Of course it is morally wrong, but I would argue that it is even more morally wrong to find something while doing that and
not report it. When you don't hear about these sorts of things, it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. I once caught a landlord randomly coming into my house when I was supposed to be away; what was he going to do? had he done it before? I had no idea. Of course in that situation, I feel it's a bit different from that of a computer tech; techs are given consent to use a person's computer and unless the operation is going to be a quick wipe and reformat some "snooping" into the system is going to be needed, as I mentioned. Of course people going through tax forms or tantalizingly named images are hardly good citizens, but the fact is that most of these occurences are probably found because the person storing the illegal data gave it a obvious name. I can imagine documents like "illegal secret cayman islands account information.doc" or "naked 7yr old and a goat.jpg" and I find it hard to believe that seeing what those files are out of a greater concern for society constitutes a breach of privacy.
