A network administrator at the University of Wisconsin at Madison was entitled to view the contents of a student’s computer remotely without first getting a warrant because the student posed an immediate threat to the campus network, a federal appeals court has ruled.
But college legal experts said the court’s decision, rather than limiting students’ privacy, broke new legal ground in support of it. The ruling said the student had “legitimate, objectively reasonable privacy expectations” concerning the data on his computer even though he had connected it to the university network. University policies, no matter what they say, “do not eliminate [the student’s] expectation of privacy in his computer,” the decision said.