county would face the risk ….

county would face the risk of being locked out of an account and no one being able to access it.

Lind also noted that IT staff can go in and retrieve emails and reset passwords if employees forget them. “You have to have someone who can perform functions when needed,” she said.

Under terms of the 2012 county computer use policy, which is in the court filings as defensive evidence, the IT department reserves the right to monitor and access any electronic communications at any time.

Lind said they consider electronic communications to be emails and basically anything stored electronically that could potentially be transmitted through email or shared. “Anything not in paper form,” she said.

Under county policy, Bowers had a county-issued cellphone which he was allowed to use for personal use provided it did not incur additional costs for the county. Bowers set up his DropBox account using his countyissued email address.

According to Lind, in March 2017 she was asked by then-sheriff Bruce Daniels to access Bowers’ DropBox account and that she had been told only that there was information on it that should not be released. She said she initially contacted DropBox and said the company was not cooperative in providing access saying there was a process the company would have to go through.

Lind said due to the situation being time sensitive she was directed to take different means to gain access.

She said that she did a password reset using Bowers’ county-issued email. She gained access and then was told what to look for and if any sharing had been done. Lind explained that there was a concern that the information could be downloaded to another device and deleted from the DropBox account. DropBox files are stored remotely and can be accessed through any internet-enabled device.

Attorney Cveykus noted that the value of using Drop-Box is that it is a secure system. He also questioned if she had ever contacted Bowers to ask his permission to access the account. He noted that on March 8, the attorney general’s office had contacted DropBox to have them hold the files and not allow anything to be deleted pending a search warrant.

Cveykus also noted that the servers where data is stored in DropBox are located throughout the United States, but that they are not owned or controlled by Taylor County. He compared the DropBox to the employee’s home computers versus their work computers.

“Do you have free range to search home computers at whim?” Cveykus asked.

“I do not,” Lind replied. She explained that with DropBox the items are synced between local devices and remotely so they are in both places. She noted that if Bowers had used a generic Gmail account she would not have been able to gain access and was only able to do so because he set it up using his county email account.

Cveykus asked if Bowers had used his work email as the recovery email for his bank account did Lind feel she would have the right to access those accounts?

“No. I don’t feel I would have that right,” she replied.

Assistant attorney general Annie Jay said she had additional case law she wanted to share and that she would want to put that information into a brief and will file it by June 1. Cveykus also said he had information to submit in briefs and will respond by June 21 with a rebuttal brief due from the state by June 29. Judge Robert Russell said he would issue a ruling on the motions regarding the admissibility of the DropBox evidence at 1:30 p.m. on July 15.