Another Day With My PC

A federal court in Germany has recently ruled that law enforcers cannot secretly go through the hard drives of the persons they’re investigating.

The decision came in the midst of government efforts to nip terrorism at the bud by checking the computer files of suspects over the Internet.  The Federal Prosecutor’s Office frowned upon the ruling, saying that the procedure or investigation over the Internet is no different from the eavesdropping methods conducted over telephone lines.

I wonder what type of computers the police use when they are conducting stealth searches on hard drives. I bet they’re no different than the ones we use at home or at the office. Hackers even claim that they could ransack business and government Web sites using the laggard PC units at the public libraries.

I’m sure that many wouldn’t want their PCs to be secretly searched by the authorities. But if you’re going to ask me, I think the police should be given a reasonable elbow room in conducting stealth searches. I wouldn’t mind them searching my desktop as long as they won’t erase any file therein. And since they’re good at public service, maybe they could do us a favor by defragmenting our disks or checking and fixing our registries while they’re rummaging through our units

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under Personal Computers . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.