Landmark decision on email privacy
Posted by Jacque on June 19th, 2007
Wired Blog Network has a fairly detailed article, summarized here, on the landmark decision issued by a federal appeals court on Monday.
The decision 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.
“This decision is of inestimable importance in a world where most of us have webmail accounts,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Because of the secrecy in which Stored Communications Act (SCA) investigations have been conducted, it is not possible to know how widespread this particular kind of government snooping into e-mail has been. “We don’t know how often [it's happened],” said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who submitted one of the briefs. “The only way to find this out is if the ISPs told us or the government told us. The information is not reported to Congress.”
Bankston suggested that the practice was widespread: “It is absolutely routine. It is and has been the Department of Justice and presumably local law enforcement’s standard practice for obtaining e-mails over the last 20 years.”
