email Greetings Dave, Today a very significant opinion was decided by the 6th Circuit (Warshak v. US, http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/07a0225p-06.pdf ) upholding 4th Amendment protections for emails. The 6th Circuit ruled, agreeing with an amicus brief filed by EFF, that "A [government] seizure of e-mails from an ISP, without either a warrant supported by probable cause, notice to the account holder to render the intrusion the functional equivalent of a subpoena, or a showing that the user maintained no expectation of privacy in the e-mail, amounts to" a 4th amendment violation. This case is doubly important because the government primarily argued that the 4th Amendment shouldn't matter, as it complied with most (but not all) of the relevant administrative subpoena statute, with its lesser standards of proof. Details: US statutes offer some privacy for emails, based on distinctions like 'sent' vs. 'in transit' vs. 'stored' vs. 'read or unread.' These categories, their standards of proof and the protections they offer, are hotly debated themselves - see a past debate on IP between the current Administration's Stewart Baker and professor Petwer Swire - http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200407/ msg00019.html Because the US has several statutes (the Wiretap Act, ECPA, etc.) that protect some emails and computer uses, most cases never have to address the 4th Amendment issue. The case can be decided just based on whether the statute was followed. A recent case, Councilman, may be familiar to readers as an example of a case that involved the intricacies of these statutes. But the issue has always been lurking as to whether or not there is additional 4th Amendment protection above and beyond the statutes - especially as amendments (like the Patriot Act) have pared back the protections or standards in these statutes. The court today signaled there clearly is independent 4th Amendment protection, and ruled that some portions of ECPA were constitutionally inadequate. Coverage on legal blogs has just started, I suspect there's more coming - http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/warshak_v_usa/ http://volokh.com/posts/1182181742.shtml http://howappealing.law.com/061807.html#026198 -Ethan ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE