Appeals Court extends privacy rights of email
June 18th, 2007 by Randy Stewart, Product Manager
From the “you win some, you lose some” department, Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that the “Appeals Court Says Feds Need Warrants to Search E-Mail.”
The Good
“A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.”
Which in and of itself is a good thing. In this day and age, email is such an important part of communication between people, having that communication protected like the telephone seems reasonable.
From the EFF:
“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. EFF disagrees and argues that the Fourth Amendment applies online just as strongly as it does offline.”
The Bad
The bad news is that this new ruling is helping a known spammer, Steven Warshak, weasel his way out of a fraud conviction. Steven Warshak is known for launching Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, which sells Enzyte, a controversial “marital aid.”
Read
[via Slashdot.org]
More coverage of the story
EFF’s Case Briefing
Court to feds: Hands off ‘Smiling Bob’s’ e-mail – Network World
Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches – Privacy Digest
Regulating the Cloud: Warshak v. United States – University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog
Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says – Freedom to Tinker
Email Safe From Government Searches – WebProNews
Appeals court: Feds can’t secretly seize e-mail without a warrant – Ars Technica
The Privacy of Internet Email – Monsters and Critics
Volokh Conspiracy – lots of detail and backstory on the case.