The Privacy of Email

An Anonymous Coward writes "A U.S. appeals court in Ohio has ruled that e-mail messages stored on Internet servers are protected by the Constitution as are telephone conversations and that a federal law permitting warrantless secret searches of e-mail violates the Fourth Amendment. 'The Stored Communications Act is very important,' former federal prosecutor and counter-terrorism specialist Andrew McCarthy told United Press International. But the future of the law now hangs in the balance."

is this actually useful?

[iHasaFlavour]

I have a few doubts. There are billions of emails flying about constantly. Anyone who beleives they can be effectivelly monitored has to be kidding themselves, so how useful is a law that says you can't do this?

Besides, if you are convicted, or suspected of crime, they can always obtain legal access to your mails, regardless, just as they could anything else you owned.

Perhaps I haven't had time to grow a sufficiently impressive tin foil hat, but I am given to think the whole idea is just plain silly.

You might as well pass laws that say you aren't allowed to follow the movement of a grain of silt in the Amazon.

How does this affect Ryan McFadyen?

[vrmlguy]

To refresh your memory, think back to the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case. Sophomore Ryan McFadyen, a member of the team and an attendee of the party, sent an email [wikipedia.org] that parodied a bit from the book American Psycho, which is (or at least was) required reading in one of Duke's English Lit classes. The police got their hands on the email and threatened to release it to the press if he didn't admit to witnessing the alledged rape. To his credit [lewrockwell.com], McFayden refused; he was subseqently villified by the press and suspended by the university.

It seems to me that this ruling means that McFadyen now has an excellent chance to pursueing a case against the prosecuter's office.

Re:Asinine

[honkycat]

A very very very small fraction of emails end up in a postmaster's box. That hardly invalidates the legal expectation of privacy. When an arrest is made on evidence found in a bounced email, post the story to slashdot... Grepping the mail spool? As the article points out, the courts specifically distinguished between sender/date (and possibly subject) meta-data and message content, so that's also irrelevant.

Do your job professionally. Just because you have access to something, doesn't give you any right to snoop. If you happen across clear evidence of illegal activities during the normal course of network maintenance, that's one thing. You'd be within your rights (and perhaps even required) to report that to the authorities. Engaging in a systematic filtering / collection of content is quite another, and that's what we're talking about here. And, specifically, by the government. If you, as a private citizen, decided to log and mine all the emails going through your server, that again would be a very different situation.

Re:the cost of freedom

[Alpha830RulZ]

On the question of airline security, I encourage you all to perform the same little experiment I do. I will often leave a golf ball mark repair tool in my pocket while going through security. This is a piece of soft steel, about 3 inches long, 1/2 inch wide, and about 1/16 inch thick, with prongs on it. In other words, it has more metal in it than a box cutter.

In my travels, this tool has -never- been detected by the metal detectors. I've run this experiment about 6 times now, through SFO, LAX, DFW and O'hare.

The laptops that flood onto planes have plenty of nooks and crannies in which blades could be secreted. A blade fits in the crevice between my battery and the wall of the case. Since this is vertical when it goes through the Xray, I have no doubt that it would pass.

The much vaunted liquid explosives that are causing us to fear sippy cups are a non-starter. Google the reaction, it starts with instructions on the order of "collect 5 gallons of ice. Mix reagents carefully, and stir for 45 minutes. " I think I can determine a more robust security procedure than forbidding water bottles.

When do we take our country back from the idiots?

Re:the cost of freedom

[jrister]

James Madison had it right 200 years ago:

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."

This continuous fearmongering by our government is being used to subdue our people. This mindset of "If you dont submit to this injustice or that that the terrorists win" is ruining our country. Unfortunately, by and large, the citizens of our country are too uneducated or apathetic to see it and do something about it. This constant BS about "If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide...", people/media/govt insinuates that because people value their freedom and privacy, there must be something wrong with them, or they are terrorist agents. Thats not the case. The founding fathers didnt place caveats on the Constitution, because it was this sort of thing they were trying to get away from when they left England.

The thing that makes me so sick about this is that I remember clearly Bush saying on 9/11 that we wont let these terrorists change our way of life. But that was a bald faced lie. Because he and the rest of the government set to work to do just that. That being the case, the terrorists have already won. They have fundamentally changed the American way of life, for the worst.

If we are to win the "War on Terror" the first step is to restore Freedom and the Constitution. Then we can deal with everything else.