Slashdot Mirror
Fourth Amendment Protects Hosted E-mail
Okian Warrior writes "As reported on the EFF website, today the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the contents of the messages in an email inbox hosted on a provider's servers are protected by the Fourth Amendment, even though the messages are accessible to an email provider. As the court puts it, 'The government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber's emails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause.'"
Our email is safe!...kind of...
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Notice they said an Internet Service Provider's servers, not a small business, or a large enterprise, or a non-profit, or government of any kind. How many people do you know that still use the Email service that comes with their ISP?
pig just flew overhead.
Wil Wheaton told me this before Slashdot did
...use Zimbra OSE.
It's free, robust(Calendar, Email, Tasks, IM(beta),etc), and relatively(to Exchange) easy to setup(on CentOS).
oh...and no Google or Yahoo reading your fackin emails to serve you ads.
Thank God we haven't lost our sanity and our vision of an America of the people, by the people and for the people.
Right in your own home.
I am so glad the EFF is helping stay on top of these thing. There if far too much to stay apprised of without someone looking out for our rights. Simply creating awareness is a huge mission.
William...
They can't legally compel them, but they can "request convincingly", I imagine. Does this mean that if the police ask my ISP for my email and my ISP hands the records over without a warrant, any evidence gotten that way is inadmissible? Does it mean I can sue my ISP?
In a physical search, anyone living in a house can consent to a search of the property. Can Comcast voluntarily consent to a search of their customers' email?
Unfortunately, there's also nothing to compel an ISP not to hand it over anyway, just to play nice with law enforcement. If you really want privacy, you have to use proper encryption. Once you've sent it to someone else, you never know where it will end up. Anyone with access to it can CHOOSE to share it with anyone they want. It's a dark dismal world we live in.
wait for it....wait for it....
Wow, a sensible ruling on internet privacy. Why do I have a sneaking feeling that this judge has stock in the company that's going to be supplying all the rubber stamps these warrants will receive?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The ruling might not be the same if the email is intercepted from some other source.
The right wingers on the Supreme Court never met an unreasonable search. I'm sure this will be another 5-4 neocon split.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
In this day & age anyone who thinks email is secure is totally disconnected from reality unless strong crypto or stego is used to protect it.
Just because it is illegal means nothing.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Let's say you use a Gmail address as your primary email instead of whatever's provided by the people who provide your internet connection. Do they count as an "internet service provider" here, or is this decision as narrow as it sounds?
Software piracy is victimless theft.
Yet another data point proving that the EFF is one of the best nonprofit organizations in the US for a geek to bestow a gift upon.
If you're the kind of donor who's inclined to reward success rather than fund battles, now's a great time...
Oh, wait... See sig.
I can see the fnords!
I appear to have broken slashdot.
My stories now load in a way that I have to click "More" a few times to get all comments.
Is there any way to have them load all comments by default, and is there any way to have it set that the majority of comments are abbreviated by default?
I know I shouldn't post here but there isn't exactly a tech support line....any help appreciated!
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
The law is nice and all, but the ONLY way to have private email is to encrypt it. And that's really easy to do these days.
Seems like that's the message the public needs to be made aware of.
Can I submit a formal request that demands my email provider not release any of my emails without being forced by warrant. If I can't stop voluntary compliance, then this is not very helpful anyway. In other words, we need the supreme court to rule that it is illegal for the host to disclose my emails without a warrant or this doesn't help in any meaningful way.
Thats the very old trick that is used. A massive passive database of who is connected to who.
One person gets a real court sneak and peek letter, anyone one connected gets their email lists sorted
- who they are connecting to and so on. So if they dont read they can collect all connecting details they want.
A bit like the NYPD collecting IMEI numbers via an offer to remove a cell phone battery to prevent leakage.
NYPD tracking cell phone owners.
Its the number/ip/logs/connections thats interesting long term, the contents can wait.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Until another judge, or five come along and say it doesn't.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Of course I use PGP/GPG if I send sensitive data, but you are wrong. It is not the point that Google can read it (of course they can, they own it.) The government needs a search warrant to access Google's e-mail, not mine, unless Google chooses to give them access. Note that I am not saying I think Google would just hand the information over, but there is another important implication: A warrant for my emails to and from a Google account will not be enforceable, since they are not my e-mails, they are Google's. Note that in this context, this is a GoodThing(tm).
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Listen up :
ALL signals traffic, and that includes email, is dealt with by agencies with three
letter names.
They don't need warrants, and they haven't for a long time.
If you actually believe that you won't be eavesdropped on by the
gov't. you are a naive fool.
If you want to make sure communication isn't eavesdropped on, you'd better
not use any means of electronic transmission, and that includes phones, email,
SMS, etc.
...but it's also a separate issue. Encrypted or not, your email should have the same legal protections as the papers in your desk.
So it is a violation of my constitutional rights for the government to access my email without my consent or a warrant. Why, then, is it alright for Wikileaks to do it?
I rent web space from ipower.com, and route all my email through it.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Where can I find a government that respects the bill of rights ?
servers, not a small business, or a large enterprise, or a non-profit
Warrants are required for these to be searched.
How many people do you know that still use the Email service that comes with their ISP?
Almost everybody I know. Some use free services like Yahoo!, I do myself, but they also use the email provided by their ISP.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I run a mail server from my home. My ISP, Qwest, explicitly allows you to run servers from a home account:
Service may be used to host a server, personal or commercial, as long as server is used pursuant to the terms and conditions of this Agreement applicable to Service and not for any malicious purposes.
Furthermore, while they may filter port 25, they will open it at your request. Finally, you are right that you need to have reverse DNS configured correctly to avoid being filtered. Qwest will do this for anyone who pays for a static IP, which you need anyway if you are running a home server, and only costs $5 a month. It took me 5 minutes on the phone to get all this setup with them (after spending half a day learning that it was needed).
Finally as far a reliability goes, the various Dynamic DNS services also offer inexpensive SMTP store and forward, so you can list them as a backup mailhost in case your home service is down. I use changeip, but have also heard good things about DynDNS.
Running your own servers from home is a good learning experience and does improve your privacy. I hate to see DIY jobs discouraged on slashdot of all places.
Indeed. It's an "old trick" that has been upheld by the Supreme Court. The aggregation of the start and end points of a conversation, but not the content of a conversation, constitutes what is known as a "pen register". Such collection was judged to be legal without a warrant or court oversight in Smith v. Maryland 442 U.S. 735 (1979). Courts have subsequently found that pen register statutes apply similarly to IP addresses, logs of web sites visited, and the "envelope" of an email message — its To: and From: addresses, dates, and related information.
There's more to this story...the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 — passed by a supermajority of both houses of Congress — allows for the signals intelligence collection without a warrant via equipment and capabilities within the United States, provided the target is not a US Person. This requires determining which traffic content can be lawfully collected without a warrant, sometimes with the assistance of telecom operators in the US. In order to determine which traffic can be lawfully collected without a warrant, basic information about the traffic, such as its source and destination, must also be examined. Such examination of metadata — a "pen register" — does not require a warrant. If you don't like what you're hearing, don't complain to me: the Supreme Court decided this over three decades ago, and the decision has held with modern technologies as well.
The hallmark of the FISA amendments are judiciously protecting US Persons, while removing restrictions on where and how foreign intelligence on non-US Persons can be collected simply because it's traveling through a glass pipe in San Francisco instead of over the air on the streets of Yemen — and that includes warrantless monitoring of identified foreign intelligence targets, and the technical mechanisms via which their communications can be located, targeted, and extracted from data streams within the US. The cornerstone of the current law and the FISC decision is the protection of the privacy and rights of United States Persons. The current law is even more stringent with respect to US Persons than previous law: an individualized warrant from FISC is required to target a US Person anywhere on the globe; before, US Persons did not enjoy the same explicit protections under the law outside of the US.
So there's a bit more going on here that's not directly related to this story.
....said my brain, and so I looked up the individual involved in the case.
To say the least, I got a stiffy...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Note that though "Warshak had a number of email accounts with various ISPs", yet "the government formally requested that NuVox prospectively preserve the contents of any emails to or from Warshak’s email account".
My understanding of the decision is that it happens to discuss an email account that NuVox supplied along with connectivity service, but covers any email account. I didn't find anything in the decision that excluded HotMail, Yahoo, or GMail from being defined as providers of an Internet service, or the case of a privately purchased domain that is hosted by the same company that also provides Internet connectivity service.
At one point, Enzyte customers seeking a refund were told they needed to obtain a notarized document indicating that they had experienced “no size increase.” The admittedly ingenious idea behind the policy was that nobody “would actually go and have anything notarized that said that they had a small penis.”
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Remember U.S. citizens. There are some incredibly evil and dangerous people in this world. They hate our freedom. They hate our culture, and their aim is to destroy our way of life and our individual liberty. They seek to conquer us and impose an autocracy to replce our Democratic Republic. These people do not think rationally, and cannot be reasoned or negotiated with. The only way to deal with them is through invasion, occupation and the use of military force.
I'm referring of course to Muslim extremists.
Today is a good day for privacy everywhere!
I have good news for you. I don't see anywhere AT&T's Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy where they forbid running a server from your home. While they aren't as explicit as Qwest in stating that you have the right to run servers they come pretty close:
The dynamic IP address is a single Internet address intended for use with a single Member Account and any associated Sub Accounts. The static IP address or multiple static IP address is intended for use with a single computer or a network of computer/servers. You may not use the Service in a manner that is inconsistent with these intended uses.
Furthermore, AT&T will configure reverse DNS for your residential home service (with a static IP), although they may require you to transfer your forward DNS to them to avoid confusion with a split record. They wouldn't do this if they forbid running servers.
I live in New Mexico, and I know what you mean about not having many options. The town where I grew up didn't have broadband until around 2002, and I think Comcast is still the only option. The town where I went to college, the only options were dial up or a wireless WAN where you pointed a directional dish toward the tower and lost connection when the wind picked up :) Most places here have both cable and DSL now though. Comcast and Time Warner are both pretty hostile to home servers, insisting you upgrade to their business package, but most DSL providers will work with you.
I'm proud to live in a country that takes due process very seriously
Really? I don't know about Britain but you can't mean the US. I already mentioned a US admin support for the Indonesian invasion of a sovereign nation, East Timor, in which 200,000 were massacred. CIA supported General Pinochet's overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile, as well as his repressive rule. How about Reagan's support of The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations. Operation Northwoods was a proposal for the CIA to commit acts of terror against US citizens in the US and blame Cuba for them. COINTELPRO was a group of actions taken by the FBI against political groups to discredit and disrupt them. The CIA's Family Jewels: "Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years, Wiretapped Journalists and Dissidents". Cubana Flight 455 was a Cuban airliner brought down by terrorists, Cubans who the CIA paid as agents. The Libertarian, Individual Liberties, and Free Markets Institute CATO has the report Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism? The Historical Record it answers in the affirmative.
And let's not forget what the US has done to American Indians. Even though the Cherokee had treaty rights in the Carolinas and Georgia, President Andrew Jackson ordered the military he commanded to force the Cherokee to march on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma after gold was found. The US broke one treaty after another signed with the Sioux, forcing them unto smaller and smaller reservations. There was the Forced sterilization of Native American Indian women through the 1970's.
If I dig some more I can find a lot more I bet. So don't go saying the US "runs a pretty tight ship".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?