[familyofman]

"A better analogy is a coat closet in an office."

I disagree, because your analogy assumes the item taken from the coat is "illegal", which the memos (internal) have not been proven to be. If you reach into someone else's pocket in a coat hanging in a closet & remove a personal letter/diary - I think you are guilty of theft. Once an item is obtained illegally, isn't it always "tainted" (constitutional search & seizure)?

[jmstein7]

You can't prove something if you can't or haven't investigated it, now can you?

An investigation is necessary to determine whether in fact the substance suggests illegality or is illegal.

You're assumption is that the memos are, per se, NOT illegal. We (and you) can't reach that conclusion because nobody has even begun to probe the substance here.

[Political Junkie Too]

you reach into someone else's pocket in a coat hanging in a closet & remove a personal letter/diary - I think you are guilty of theft.

I think your analogy mischaracterizes the nature of the committee setup, the computer system, and the memos.

This committee is the only bipartisan committee, meaning that they have one joint staff instead of two staffs, one joint computer instead of separate computers. The memos on the computer were accessible to all members and staffs. There was no firewall (perhaps a misnomer -- protected directories would be a better example) between the Republican side and the Democrat side of the computer. In fact, I think there would be more suspicions raised if the parties demanded separate protected space on a jointly shared computer on a bipartisan committee with one shared staff.

So, the memos were not stolen because the people using the computer (regardless of party) had a right to anything on the computer. If mistakes were made, it was made by the staffers who used the committee computer for partisan business in the first place. That is what personal laptops are for.

-PJ

[mjaneangels@aolcom]

"I disagree, because your analogy assumes the item taken from the coat is "illegal", which the memos (internal) have not been proven to be. If you reach into someone else's pocket in a coat hanging in a closet & remove a personal letter/diary - I think you are guilty of theft."

You are making a huge assumption here. If I am the one trying to hang up my coat in a coat closet, something may drop out and on to the floor. Does that make me a thief?

If you knew much about computer networks, the whole reason that there are so many IT people is not to prevent a hardened criminal from committing a crime, the vast majority of IT work is to prevent accidents from happening. Did you know that something like 85% of all computer viruses are caused by typos? Yes, they are by far caused by accidents.