ePrivacy
by Lee
Slowly but surely we’re regaining the rights that the current administration has tried so hard to take away from us.
A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision (.pdf) 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.
“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.
From the amicus brief filed by the EFF:
“This case must be considered in the context of one overriding fact: millions of Americans use email every day for practically every type of personal business. Private messages and conversations that once would have been communicated via postal mail or telephone now occur through email, the most popular mode of Internet communication. Love letters, family photos, requests for (and offerings of) personal advice, personal financial documents, trade secrets, privileged legal and medical information—all are exchanged over email, and often stored with email providers after they are sent or received. These myriad private uses of email demonstrate society’s expectation that the personal emails sent and received over the Internet and stored with email providers are as private as a sealed letter, a telephone call, or even papers that are kept in the home.”
Damn that pesky Constitution.
Comments
No, I never thought we were going to end up in some kind of dictatorship. But as I said before, republics end by rot from within, not from some external force.
Let me try and illustrate this. Say we, the people, have 1,000 rights. An administration comes along and tries to erode or remove 20 of those rights. The court system does its job and keeps the administration in check, ruling against it in 16 of 20 cases. We’re still 4 rights less than we had before. So the next administratiuon comes along and they attack 100 of our rights, with the courts overturning 82 of their attempts. That’s 22 rights we’ve lost.
See what I mean? This is why rights have to be so vocally and actively defended, because it’s the erosion, the death by 1,000 cuts, that is the real threat.
Al-Qaeda can blow up a building or kill a few thousand people. But it takes the US government to remove what privacy rights I have left.
Isn’t there a thread just below this where you admonish the administration for deleting personal e-mails? I know they were done on government equipment, but looking at them is just like tapping phone lines, right?
Isn’t there a thread just below this where you admonish the administration for deleting personal e-mails? I know they were done on government equipment, but looking at them is just like tapping phone lines, right?
I think the response to this would be that anything done on an employer’s equipment ought to be done with the expectation that the employer can audit your usage at any time. Kind of like how I’ll probably get in trouble for reading a blog at work right now :-P
Now if they are personal addresses, such as your ISP address for your home, or a yahoo/hotmail/g-mail account, then it needs to be regarded as private, just like regular mail. Which I think is the point raised in the previous post.
No, I never thought we were going to end up in some kind of dictatorship. But as I said before, republics end by rot from within, not from some external force.
That’s good to hear. And you’re absolutely right about the decay from within, though in many cases the final blow is an outside attack against the weakened state—think the decadent Roman Empire empire which was unable to repel the Germanic hordes.
Isn’t there a thread just below this where you admonish the administration for deleting personal e-mails?
If government employees (people paid with my tax dollars) and others involved in my government are using their personal email accounts to conduct the business of government, then they have forfeited their right to privacy for those accounts. I haven’t heard of someone trying to subpoena “thecheneyfamily@gmail.com” though…
But, it’s just like the Bush administration to try to hide behind the very rights they’re trying to erode. Fucking snakes.
personal emails sent and received over the Internet and stored with email providers are as private as a sealed letter, a telephone call, or even papers that are kept in the home.”
Brilliant interpretation. thank God people are coming around to recognizing that digital information is just as important and private as paper items.
It might have been all too easy to allow intrusion due to ease of access of tis information.
Al-Qaeda can blow up a building or kill a few thousand people. But it takes the US government to remove what privacy rights I have left.
This is the victory over the United States Al-quaeda rightfully declares.
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Lee -
I know that you’ve been very vocal over the last couple of months to a year about the grabs for executive power by the administration.
And I know that you’ve got to be happy to see some progress (like this) in turning those abuses back.
My question is, did you ever truly doubt that the “system” would eventually work?
I think that could have been inferred from some of your rhetoric, but I don’t know if you’ve ever come right out and said that you feared or expected that the system would collapse into a quasi-dictatorship. Did/do you?