Slashdot Mirror
11th Circuit Eliminates 4th Amend. In E-mail
Artefacto writes "Last Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a Fourth Amendment case, Rehberg v. Paulk, that takes a very narrow view of how the Fourth Amendment applies to e-mail. The Eleventh Circuit held that constitutional protection in stored copies of e-mail held by third parties disappears as soon as any copy of the communication is delivered. Under this new decision, if the government wants get your e-mails, the Fourth Amendment lets the government go to your ISP, wait the seconds it normally takes for the e-mail to be delivered, and then run off copies of your messages."
Ok, snail mail isn't allowed to be opened and copied under federal law (exceptions such as military, etc, exist).
Sec. 1702. Obstruction of correspondence
Whoever takes any letter, postal card, or package out of any post office or any authorized depository for mail matter, or from any letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any post office or authorized depository, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was directed, with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or opens, secretes, embezzles, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If only we could get the same for email. That way no copies can be made and handed off to another party.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen.
I've said this many times here before, and I'll say it again... don't let them see anything other than the delivery envelope (headers) of your email. They can't legally open your postal mail, so treat it the same: gpg/PGP-encrypt your emails; all of them.
If a recipient you email frequently doesn't know how to use encryption, teach them. There are plugins for Firefox, Gmail, Thunderbird, Mail.app, and dozens of other mail clients.
If it's someone you don't converse over email with often, then it's probably not worth protecting anyway.
Seriously...
Learn to create, protect and use your gpg keys and your keychain. It's not that hard, and the benefits far outweigh the minutes of work and learning it takes to incorporate it into your daily workflow.
Palm trees and 8
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.
You are thinking of the Revolutionary war. The Civil war was the war between the states. Some four-score and seven years later.
The US Constitution was ratified in 1788 (though the Bill of Rights was not made effective until 1791, and they were not made to apply to the states in superseding state law until the 'incorporation' under the 20th century 14th Amendment interpretation explicit in cases like Gitlow v. New York), the US Civil War began in 1861. Please, please tell me that you are not a US voter.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The case can be read at:
http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/page.htm?shortname=infco20100311081
Here's a brief summary
1. A guy sent some faxes to a hospital criticizing their management and mocking them.
2. The prosecutors and police were friends of the hospital management and they investigated this as a "favor"...
3. they secured three successive indictments against the guy, all of which included felony assault against a man he never met
4. each time the indictments were dismissed by a higher court
5. but they arrested and held him anyway
6. so he sued for violation of his 4th because they got his phone records and emails without a warrant and for malicious prosecution
7. The 11th circuit dismissed ALL the malicious prosecution claims, granted the police and prosecution total immunity, and ruled that the plaintiff's rights weren't violated when his emails were turned over, because they had already been "delivered" to his ISP.
There are a lot more things wrong with this decision than just the 4th amendment violations.
Tariffs between states did not exist at that time. Perhaps you are confusing the issue of tariffs between the states with export tariffs on agricultural goods? The tariff issue boils down to protectionist tariffs on finished goods (helping the North's industrial base), and export tariffs on agricultural goods (the North wanted the South to sell goods cheaply to them, not to sell goods overseas).
Every president of the US did likewise in time of war. And each time, it wasn't quite as bad. Judge Learned Hand wrote extensively about this; Lincoln was no different (and perhaps a little better wrt rights, even) than prior wartime presidents. Rights are trampled in time of war, then peacetime review finds problems with those actions... so in the next war, rights are trampled a little less. This has held true until, arguably, the current war in Iraq.
You miss the purpose of his campaign. It was not for fun -- it was to demoralize the heart of the insurgency. And it worked, however nauseating it may be in hindsight.
The south would have done the same were they able to. They did, after all, initiate the hostilities. The south's campaign into Pennsylvania was a good example of the south practicing a lot of the same tactics the north would later use in the south... the only reason there wasn't a lot of infrastructure damage is because the south wanted to use the north's rail systems at the front. Had the south been able to get past the front, they would have destroyed northern infrastructure.
I'm a damned yankee, and I look down on much of the south. There's ignorance and stupidity everywhere (present company excepted, of course), but the south seems to have gotten a double helping.
FWIW, I look down on much of the north as well...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I don't know about you, but when I send an unencrypted email I have no expectation of privacy from the moment the text leaves my computer.
Expectation of privacy means you can reasonably expect your privacy to be respected, not that you can reasonably expect it to remain secure even in the face of someone trying to violate it!
Example: A conversation in your home is private, even though a simple glass held to your window can let someone listen in. It is reasonable to expect that people will not do this. A conversation in a restaurant is not private, because you cannot reasonably expect that nobody will listen to you -- in fact it's difficult for them not to.
Your ISP has no reason to read your email outside of the header. It is reasonable to expect that your ISP will respect your privacy in this case. It is doubly reasonable to expect that the police will respect your privacy, so long as they are obeying the law.
The interpretation that "expectation of privacy" means "how much privacy can you expect to have in the face of malicious people deliberately trying to violate it" is incorrect, and silly. It would make the 4th Amendment meaningless, because anything that someone can view is ipso-facto not private and thus not subject to the 4th.
The enemies of Democracy are