Star Tribune – December 18, 2006:
The government needs a search warrant if it wants to read the U.S. mail that arrives at your home. But federal prosecutors say they don’t need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else’s computer.
That would include all of the Big Four e-mail providers — Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Google — that together hold e-mail accounts for 135 million Americans.
The government isn’t saying it has unfettered access to e-mail. But e-mail users should not expect privacy when they allow an outside party to store their messages, prosecutors argue.
Advocates for Internet privacy and civil liberties are watching the Warshak case closely. In their view, e-mail deserves the same protection as snail mail, which can’t be opened by government agents without a search warrant.
Do they need a search warrant to search the contents of a post office box? If so, then the same principle should apply.
Email contents are extremely easy to sniff out of the networks.
They can’t do it in your PC, it would be at the email server – at the ISP – that they would do this.
I say let them do it, so we can have the feds see that 95% of traffic is SPAM and will do something about it.
Only at the ISP level can SPAM be effectively fought.
Hehehe, I remember when my home country, Brazil, was a military dictatorship, and the sane people in the country would dream of a democracy like the USA (the stupid ones wanted to be Cuba).
Now, 20 years in the future, we are sorry for the dying American democracy. You guys set an example to the world in the 20th century. Too bad the party is over. Good news is people survive dictatorships. Maybe if you vote right in 2008 you can revert this.
No matter if this Warshak is a scammer, this case sets a dangerous precedent. Emails are private and should be free from government eyes.
I would say “poor America”, but hey, you guys VOTED FOR THIS ADMINISTRATION!
I’m a criminal defense lawyer, not a constitutional scholar.
I don’t think today’s post reflects anything new.
As I understand it, the 4th Amendment banning unreasonable search and siezures requires a “reasonable” expectation of privacy. Therefore, postcards are not protected, but sealed mail is.
As I recall, the circuit courts decided long ago that unencrypted email that is forwarded from one ISP to the next is like a postcard. There has been at least one case in which an ISP was spying on customer emails to gain business advantage.
Much of this controversy first arose during the Clinton Administration’s efforts to put “black boxes” in major ISP backbones to scan email and who-knows-what-else.
So, for the solution, don’t look to the government.
Just go get a good encryption packages like PGP and TrueCrypt
Here’s the thing. People and any organization can already spy in on your e-mail already. So what they will likely do is in order to properly use any incriminating e-mails in court, they have to issue a warrant for “legally” obtain the evidence that they already got before hand illegally, and present that to the court, while using the “illegal” evidence to get the warrant in the first place.
Problem is we need to define what falls under the jurisdiction of privacy as it already pertains to postal mail, and telephone tapping. So to make it simple it should be a blanket privacy act that includes everything; e-mail, as well as instant messages, SMS messages, voice mail, and everything done on an electronic device used to send a person-to-person information digital or analog (but not broadcast like Radio)
#4. David, I like your analysis but not your analogy. Anyone can look at a post card and see its contents without taking any additional action. A postcard is completely open to the world.
I don’t know about you, but I cannot see emails without having some sort of access to the computer in which it resides, at least a keyboard, the user-name and password of the account I want access to, and some sort of third party application to read the email.
If your analogy is right, then the police would also have the right to read your enveloped mail without a search warrant by simply using an x-ray machine.
I just wanted to add, I would think that if the recipient of the email gives permission, the police would be able to read it without the sender’s permission. Obviously the police feel it easier to intercept it at the ISP level.
Telephone calls over copper wire can be easily eavesdropped on if you actively go out to do it; Data sent over TCP/IP can be intercepted if you actively go out to do so. This is why I don’t understand the postcard analogy to email that #4 cited. Sure, most email may be unencrypted, but unless you are actively snooping for other people’s message traffic, you aren’t going to accidentally come across it. Especially considering computers are doing all of the sorting and forwarding of the data. There’s no reason for anybody except for the sender and recipient to see the message; even though anybody can if they set out to do so.
Have to agree with Mike (#1) on this one. If your email can be legally read while it’s stored elsewhere, the you have to figure that the same applies to your postal mail while it’s being stored for sorting. Also, anything you send by a courier service.
The issue here is what level of privacy people expect.. Why should email NOT be treated the same as postal is the question. Just because it’s transmitted electronically shouldn’t make the expectation of privacy any less.
Bastard Republicans are at it again..
Wake up people, this type of government easvedropping discussion was unheard of before the Bush regime seized power. Now we are all debating how “bad” it really is. The GOP trick is to you numb and apathetic to more and more government control.
Time to take it back.
Just assume that the government and/or criminals (is there a difference?) are reading your e-mail and act accordingly. Send sensitive information to only those you can trust and make sure it is encrypted.
Well, -gosh-, if you don’t do anything wrong – what is there to fear?
(/snark)
One more thing for David (4) – Assume the NSA can read your mail anyway, if they really want to – your encryption package won’t help anything. They knew about differential cryptanalysis decades before anyone else, who knows what else they know … (check it out on wikipedia – the cryptography prof at my university told me the same thing about DES)
The difference between a letter and a postcard is you have to open one.
You have to open an email.
I would say that we should make the law clear on that, but considering the government has no regard for privacy laws anyway it doesn’t make much difference.
3. Touche`
The introduction to the Bill of Rights passed by Congress reads: “The Conventions of a number of the States having, at the time of adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added, and as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;”
The thing that strikes me most about these types of issues is that the government will use any means to justify its actions, even when they run contrary to the spirit of the Constitution which established it. That the judiciary is equally willing to go along with it, or tell them how they might work around it is of greater concern.
S-Mail everything…
I think these guys have it right…
http://s-mail.com/
10:
Don’t bash the entire GOP for the fuck ups of what George W Bush (and his dad) have done. Violating ones privacy has been going around since the USA was formed.
Stop pointing blame at GW Bush, everyone knows he’s the worst president we’ve had in history. Say something new for a change, and stop regurgitating the same tired tantrum all you anti-republicans keep spewing. I’m really getting tired of hearing it, everyone has heard this at-nauseum, and getting the blame for this asshole in office. I didn’t vote for him so please STFU already.
#4 – I’d forgotten all about those black boxes – thanks for the reminder that politicians are about power and the government will never, ever be a trustworthy guardian of rights. #18 – I’m sure there are some decent Republicans. Would it be nice if some of them managed to run for office?
About the email, since I live in Mexico I just assume the government has agents (or, more likely, software) reviewing my boring emails. If I wanted to say something and not have the government read it (of course I never, ever do, nope) I wouldn’t use email to say it, not even encrypted email. That s-mail service someone mentioned might be good, though – it’s located outside the U.S. Anybody know if Ireland’s privacy laws are as strong as, say, Germany’s?
Can you imagine if all email was commonly given full encryption? They’d make themselves crazy trying to decode everything. Yes, they can decrypt, but it would take up lots of computing power to decrypt full encryption, and if it was done as a matter of common practice, with most servers, they wouldn’t be able to do it.
talking about mail or telephone or whatever personal freedom and privace we are used to have, in the last few years this all has become suspect to the governments.
They’re trying to get better control over what people think and say. They say they do so to protect us from the bad guys.
In the process off all this, there’s one thing that consistently gets in the way: the old constitutions. It’s the case here in Germany and I bet it’s the case in the US as well.
The latest example? After the attacks of Sept 11th 2001, a mentally desoriented guy got into a single engine touring motorglider. An airplane with a maximum takeoff weight of 750kg, mostly consisting of glass fibre composit. He circled over the highrises of Frankfurt, threatening he whould crash his airplane into one in case the German media would not publish the fact that jewish people had been very important in the American space program, namely that one of the female astronauts on board the Challenger was jewish.
The German security forces were obviously most delighted to finally have our very own terrorist. If only a few numbers smaller than what hat happened in NY. They scrambled two F4 Phantom II fighters to find and, if necessary, shoot down the plane. (if you’re interested: just look up the maximum speed of a “Super Dimona” – the composite plane, and the minimum speed of a Phantom. Also make some calculations on the kinetic engergy of a 500kg light airplane and a round of bullets from the gun of a phantom hitting a highrise. Let’s forget for a minute that the latter are filled with explosives and will, in fact, explode upon hitting something). Anyway, long story to what I want to get to: This incident led our legislation to propose an “Air Safety Act” that introduced a couple of things that make it a lot more difficult to be a private pilot in Germany and, at the same time, tried to introduce a mechanism by which the airforce would be allowed to shoot down a fully loaded airliner if it was to be used like the ones in NY.
This law was, fortunately, rejected by the ultimate German court, saying it was not compatible with the constitution that allows military action inside Germany only in war times, what we call the “state of defense”.
So, mission not accomplished Mr. secretary of state. Stupid constitution.
Just last week, a re-write of the above law has been suggested. The main change was obviously that they’ve inserted a phrase saying that “an attack with an airliner creates a quasi state of defense”, so martial law could be applied.
This has been added with the sole purpose to overcome the limitation in the constitution.
Why am I writing all this? Governments in most western democracies are finding it harder and harder to stay within the boundries that the constitutions create. If we care at all for our freedom and safety, we should make very sure that these boundries are obeyed and clearly use every constitutional right to defend the constitutions against this worldwide onslaught of malicious people who conspire with the terrorists by using the fear that terror creates to push for their own goals.
pj
Was it bad weather or something?