United States v. Jeffrey Brian Ziegler

ORDER

The petition for panel rehearing is GRANTED. The opinion filed on August 8, 2006, is withdrawn. The superseding opinion will be filed concurrently with this order. Further petitions for rehearing or rehearing en banc may be filed.

OPINION

We must determine whether an employee has an expectation of privacy in his workplace computer sufficient to suppress images of child pornography sought to be admitted into evidence in a criminal prosecution. If there is such an expectation, we must determine whether the search in this case was reasonable under the narrow exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

I

A

Frontline Processing (“Frontline”), a company that services Internet merchants by processing on-line electronic payments, is located in Bozeman, Montana. On January 30, 2001, Anthony Cochenour, the owner of Frontline’s Internet-service provider and the fiancé of a Frontline employee, contacted Special Agent James A. Kennedy, Jr. of the FBI with, a tip that a Frontline employee had accessed child-pornographic websites from a workplace computer.

Agent Kennedy pursued the report that day, first contacting Frontline’s Internet Technology (“IT”) Administrator,…