Court Effectively Says No 4th Amendment Protection To Copies Of Emails
from the that's-not-good dept
Earlier this year, we wrote about some Fourth Amendment questions when it came to information stored in the cloud -- and a recent legal ruling provides some new troubling views on this matter. Slashdot points us to Orin Kerr's excellent analysis of a recent 11th Circuit decision, that basically says once an email is delivered, there's no Fourth Amendment protections of that email. But, as Kerr notes, the real problem here (as with so many issues in the digital world) is that the court seems to be confusing copies of digital content with the original:For a real-world example, imagine you write a letter and photocopy it before you put it in the mail. You file the copy in your closet and send the original. During the course of delivery, the original is protected by the Fourth Amendment; when it arrives, you lose Fourth Amendment protection. But the fact that you lose Fourth Amendment protection in the original does not mean that the Government can break into your house and read the copy you made. Conversely, the fact that the recipient of the mail does not have Fourth Amendment rights in the copy does not mean that the government can break into the recipient’s house to read the original.We see this over and over again when it comes to the digital world. People try to automatically equate it to the physical world, not recognizing that they're dealing with independent copies, not the original (hence the argument that "file sharing is the same as theft.") Unfortunately, in this case the ruling could do some serious damage to how the government and law enforcement views your expectation of privacy with regards to your emails.
For these reasons, the court should have analyzed access to the e-mails stored with the ISP based on whether there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in that remotely stored copy accessed, independently of delivery of another copy....
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Filed Under: 4th amendment, copies, email
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Encryption.
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Re: Encryption.
qANQR1DDDQQJAwKQ6VTiJaeaTJjSWAFxqdnE+uVwCAaEk0SCFwtFCAuMQdGoctoQ
xfVFXFyGT8jcG2d2e+tb 83ZuMHuyKZTK0Z5ozfMqVAQPAPT+i754ehtPDzcJQljl
IXaCS/9WbA3BilFujjQ=
=t3fQ
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
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Plausible real world scenario
After the original is delivered to the final destination, the sender loses the 4th amendment protections present in transit and the recipient gains them for the possessed letter.
What about all those copies that exist along the way?
It seems to me this pretty well replicates the digital process of sending an email. Would those physical copies be protected?
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hmm
If only we could have judges who actually understood tech and the internet.
Even better would be politicians who understood it too.
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Re: hmm
(and start a lawyer hunting season to control their population)
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My View On Email Security...
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Re: My View On Email Security...
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Incorrect analogy
a. alice writes a letter
b. alice photocopies the letter and sends to charles, asking him to mail it to bob
c. charles photocopies the letter and sends it to bob.
d. bob receives the letter
e. police go to charles and ask to see his copy of the letter
f. charles agrees.
in this situation can alice reasonably expect to have 4th amendment protections over the copy in charles' possession?
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Re: Incorrect analogy
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Infinite goods
As Anonymous Coward said,encryption solves this problem everywhere.
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Re: Infinite goods
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The envelope, and that is encryption.
Emails today are like sending letters without a seal.
Even though encryption is only good for 10~20 years before it can be broken, if you encrypt you are showing clearly that the intention is not to be public but private. You could even use ROT13 and that should be enough to show an attempt at privacy.
If that is not the case, there is a lot of banking data just waiting to be mined.
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Reply
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SLAVERY
How much worse does it have to get before the people who are acting like docile domesticated SLAVES, stand up for their countryman's most basic fundamental Unalienable rights as a human being the Almighty GOD "YHWH" Himself has given to each one of us.
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