A landmark court decision found that the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) violated Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure by allowing the government to search and seize email from email service providers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sent out notice of the decision and of their own filing of a brief supporting the decision. The decision was regarding Warshak vs. United States, filed by Steven Warshak who sought to stop the government from secretly searching and seizing his stored email based on the SCA. The court ruled that government must obtain a search warrant.
The government will appeal the decision to the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision is the first to decide whether email users have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their stored email.
“Email users clearly expect that their inboxes are private, but the government argues the Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect emails at all when they are stored with an ISP or a webmail provider like Hotmail or Gmail,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.
“EFF disagrees. We think that the Fourth Amendment applies online just as strongly as it does offline, and that your email should be as safe against government intrusion as your phone calls, postal mail, or the private papers you keep in your home.”
The federal government has been very aggressive, especially in the last few years, about snatching as much online information as possible to support some very sweeping objectives.
Last winter, the Department of Justice subpoenaed all the major search engines to release vast amounts of user search records for a so-called child pornography crack down. It was really more of an attempt to learn if someone somewhere may have at one time accessed a website that might have something illegal on it, or may be too easily accessible by minors.
That’s a lot of warrantless digging for what may or may not be out there. Of MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and Google, only Google resisted the subpoena and made the DOJ prove their case in court. Google was forced to hand over the information eventually, even if highly truncated.
The now infamous AOL Data Valdez search data leak proved to many the myriad privacy concerns presented by access to user data. It took the New York Times only a few days to identify a searcher, what she search for, making it easy to know many things about her.
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