The question of whether the Probation Department's monitoring of a convicted pornographer's computer violates the Fourth Amendment arose in United States v. Lifshitz, a case decided by the Second Circuit on March 30, 2004. The case, authored by Judge Katzmann, was one of first impression in that the Second Circuit had "never evaluated the conformity of special conditions of probation or supervised release with the Fourth Amendment." The Court noted that, under Supreme Court precedent, to allow a special needs search in the absence of probable cause or a warrant, (1) the government must allege a special need, (2) there must be a diminished expectation of privacy and (3) the search must seek a minimum of intrusiveness coupled with maximum effectiveness so that the searches bear a close and substantial relationship to the government's special needs. The Court remanded the case to the district court to evaluate the privacy implications of the proposed computer monitoring techniques as well as their efficacy as compared with computer filtering, and then to impose a condition. The decision can be found here. Stay tuned for future developments.