Fourth Amendment Scenarios

The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures (Hall, 2014). In the scenario, it is important to remember that the employer is a government entity and the Fourth Amendment was originally designed to limit government authority as it applies to unreasonable searches and seizures (Hall, 2014). You would not be able to make a strong argument that the government violated the Fourth Amendment in this scenario. The property, whether it is a laptop, cell phone, or tablet, belongs to the government. Government entities have policies that employees must read and sign specifically acknowledging there is no expectation of privacy on these devices owned by the government.

Changing the scenario still doesn’t bode well for the employee. The U.S. Supreme Court

Again, the standards of use are clear and the expectation of privacy does not survive the government’s interest and already established case law. If using a personal thumb-drive in a government owned device, the employee would not have any rights under the Fourth Amendment for that thumb drive being searched and seized. Is the governments search or seizure unreasonable? It would not be once an employee introduced a device such as a thumb-drive into the government computer. The government has a vested interest in the cyber security of their network. Thumb-drives can have devastating effects when connected to a network. They make the governments system vulnerable to viruses, malware, and other threats that can compromise the security of sensitive information. Also, thumb-drives or devices like them make it extremely easy to obtain data that should not be removed from government computers. This again gives the government a reasonable interest in the protection of “their” property to search these personally used