A man who forgot to remove a thumb drive from a shared computer that he was using, waived his privacy claims to the content on that device, a federal judge in Florida has ruled.
The ruling, by Judge Maurice Paul of the U.S. District Court for the northern district of Florida, was in response to a motion filed by Octavius Durdley an emergency paramedic with the Bradford County Emergency Services (BCES) in Florida.

Durdley was charged last September with possessing and distributing child pornography based largely on evidence gathered from a personal thumb drive of his that he had inadvertently left behind in a shared work computer.

Durdley claimed that the information gathered from the thumb drive had resulted from a warrantless search of his personal property. He asked for the evidence from the thumb drive, and that gathered from a subsequent search of his house, to be suppressed asserting Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

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