Source: philomathnews.com 3/29/26
The Oregon Supreme Court on Thursday overturned a Lane County man’s conviction for encouraging child sex abuse, ruling that local authorities subjected him to a warrantless search when monitoring his use of a restaurant’s free wireless internet network.
In 2018 and 2019, Oakridge resident Randall De Witt Simons had accessed an A&W restaurant’s wireless internet network which extended into the range of his own home in Lane County. The network required a terms of service agreement, which noted that the restaurant chain may cooperate with legal authorities in the investigation of an alleged crime or may disclose internet activity in response to lawful requests by authorities.
After the restaurant owner discovered the suspicious activity, the business reported the information to local law enforcement who directed the owner to continue tracking Simons’ activity. The business gave authorities more than 250,000 activity logs of all the websites Simons had accessed, including those which a firewall had flagged for “child abuse images.”
For more than a year, according to the ruling, law enforcement had the business track his activity and report it to …