Shirley Reid, an employee of Jersey Diesel, had been away from her job on disability leave. Reid returned to work on the morning of August 24, 2004 and had an argument with Timothy Wilson, the company’s owner, about her temporary light duty assignment. At 9.57 a.m., someone accessed Jersey Diesel’s account on website of its supplier Donaldson Company, Inc.. At 10:07 a.m., that person changed the account’s password and changed the shipping address to a non-existent address.
Donaldson contacted Wilson to notify him of the change made to his company’s account. The supplier provided Wilson with the IP address of the user who accessed Jersey Diesel’s account. Wilson then contacted the ISP, Comcast, who refused to disclose the identity of the user without a subpoena. Suspecting Reid because she was the only employee who knew the company’s username and password, Wilson reported the occurrence to the Lower Township Police Department on August 27.
Comcast revealed Reid to be the subscriber a week after being served with a subpoena duces tecum by the Lower Township Municipal Court on September 7. On the basis of that information, Reid was arrested on October 9 and indicted for second-degree computer theft on February 22, 2005.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has issued an opinion on the privacy rights of computer users, holding in State v. Reid that computer users have a reasonable expectation of privacy concerning the personal information they give to their ISPs
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As a result, New Jersey offers greater privacy rights to computer users than most federal courts..
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