Essentially, the fourth amendment forbids unwarranted searches and seizures. Furthermore, the fourth amendment is now held primarily to protect "reasonable expectations of privacy.” The "reasonable expectations" concept became widely-used after the 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, which held that an individual could have a "reasonable" (and thus protectable) expectation …show more content…
Essentially, employers need not establish probable cause or obtain warrants before conducting workplace searches. However, they must be prepared to defend the reasonableness of searches and other actions that infringe on employees reasonable expectations of privacy.
Likewise, I would say that the employee had an reasonable expectation of privacy of his office and his contents as he was the only occupant of the office and in addition it was kept locked. Furthermore, Mr. Ziegler felt that since he was not informed of the search that he was violated. Since he had a reasonable expectation in his office and computer since it was a private office and kept lock.
Therefore, since his employer provided the key used to enter his office and equally important his employers manual fully informed and explained that their computers were subject to monitoring Internet