In the wake of the arrest of a man found with child pornography on his computer, questions of the moral line vs. the legal line of privacy have been raised.
Garry Michael Cloer, 49, of 230 Johnson St., was arrested Monday and charged with 23 counts of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor. The charges came after an almost year-long investigation after an image was discovered on his computer while it was being worked on at N-Tech Solutions.
Representatives from N-Tech Solutions want to stress their emphasis on privacy and confidentiality, but say there are some things that can’t be overlooked.
But a civil libertarian thinks that every person has a right to view whatever images they want to view in the privacy of their own home.
The case started one Friday afternoon in December when Shayne Lory, operations manager for N-Tech Solutions, was working on Cloer’s computer. He and a friend — who is a law enforcement officer, but was off duty — were hanging out as Lory worked on transferring Cloer’s hard drive.
Business owner Pete Hansen said Cloer had been a customer before, and on this occasion had asked the company to transfer all of the contents of his hard drive to a new one.
While transferring all the folders and files, Lory said he highlighted a number of pictures to move them when a thumbnail image popped up on the left hand side of the screen.
The image was that of a girl who Lory said looked about 4 in a “compromising position” with a man. “I was dumfounded,” Lory said.
He said he didn’t look at anymore pictures. Lory said there were more than 200 images on Cloer’s hard drive, however he has no idea what they are of.
Lory contacted his boss, Hansen, who came to the store to assess the situation. He said in the two years he’s owned the company, he’s never seen anything like this. “It made me sick when I saw it,” Hansen said. He estimated the age of the adult in the picture to be about 40.
“When you see something like that, flashes of your children pop in your head,” said Hansen, who has a 6-year-old of his own.
Lory was torn about what to do. He said he too had never seen anything like the picture before, “and to be honest I don’t want to see anything like it again.
“I personally was not going to turn it in,” said Lory, who was worried about violating someone’s privacy.
“If something is blatantly there and illegal it is my duty to report that regardless of the consequences,” Lory said.
Hansen said he was also apprehensive about contacting authorities at first. “You can’t point fingers and accuse people” without substantial proof, he said. People often receive mass e-mails that are unsolicited and may contain pornography. But when he realized that the image had been saved to the hard drive and that there were potentially many more images, he said he felt the situation had crossed the line. This was not an accident, he said.
Lory looked to his friend, the officer, for advice on what to do.
Lory said that he is not sure what he would have done had his friend not been there that day. “But I didn’t leave it up to me,” he said.
His friend said to contact Detective Shelia Lingle at the Salisbury Police Department.
Lory finished the work on the computer and Cloer came in and picked it up. Lory said he did not say anything to Cloer at the time.
Lory then contacted Lingle, who came out to take a statement from him.
A couple days later a State Bureau of Investigation agent came by the business to interview Lory and then he didn’t hear much about the incident for months.
In June, the SBI agent called Lory to thank him for his help with the case, but it wasn’t until he read the newspaper that Lory heard Cloer had been arrested.
Both Hansen and Lory want to stress that they do not snoop through customers’ files.
“I believe in privacy,” Hansen said. “I want my customers to feel like they are in good hands.”
Hansen said that the picture never would have normally been discovered.
“If I could do my work with the monitor off I would,” Lory said. He wants people to understand that they do not go through files. “I have a passion for computers. I don’t have a passion to be nosy.”
“We don’t look through other people’s records,” Hansen said, but “when something like this just smacks you in the face you have to do something about it.”
Hansen said he feels as though they did the right thing in notifying the police.
“A computer is very private,” Lory said. “To me a computer is like a diary.”
Emeritus Kenan Professor Daniel Pollitt — who taught constitutional law at UNC-Chapel Hill — disagrees with their course of action. “It’s really thought control,” he said. “What’s a diary? It’s your thoughts written down.”
Pollitt likened this case to others, including a recent case out of Columbus Ohio. In July Brian Dalton, 22, a previously convicted child pornographer, was sentenced to seven years in prison on pornography charges for writing his fantasies about children in a private journal. These fictitious stories were not disseminated, but were found by Dalton’s probation officer during a search of his home.
Pollitt believes that in the Cloer case, the company should have done nothing.
Pollitt said he is not condoning the production of child pornography and that the creators should be punished. However, “a man’s house is his castle and he can think anything he wants, he can read anything he wants and he can do anything he wants.”
He says the climate across the country is changing and that people’s right to privacy has dwindled in recent years. With court appointments by conservative presidents came the tightening grip on first amendment rights and rights to privacy, Pollitt said.
Contact Jillian McCartney at 704-797-4253 or jmccartney@salisburypost.com
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