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IRS Can Read Your Email Without Warrant
kodiaktau writes "The ACLU has issued a FOIA request to determine whether the IRS gets warrants before reading taxpayers' email. The request is based on the antiquated Electronic Communication Protection Act — federal agencies can and do request and read email that is over 180 days old. The IRS response can be found at the ACLU's website. The IRS asserts that it can and will continue to make warrantless requests to ISPs to track down tax evasion. Quoting: 'The documents the ACLU obtained make clear that, before Warshak, it was the policy of the IRS to read people’s email without getting a warrant. Not only that, but the IRS believed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to email at all. A 2009 "Search Warrant Handbook" from the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel baldly asserts that "the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications." Again in 2010, a presentation by the IRS Office of Chief Counsel asserts that the "4th Amendment Does Not Protect Emails Stored on Server" and there is "No Privacy Expectation" in those emails.'"
Really, if you're not encrypting your email, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If your communications are in plaintext, being passed around from server to server in plaintext, it would be absolutely stupid to expect that would be in any way private. It's about as private as a postcard: no envelope, all information plainly visible to anyone that handles it..
oops.
http://triblive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_720838.html
http://www.irs.gov/irm/part5/irm_05-017-013.html
The 180-day limit is based on an antiquated legal standard, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 1986 - more than 25 years ago. At the time, email was still in its infancy, and "cloud"-based email providers like Yahoo, GMail, etc. simply didn't exist.
Efforts are underway to update the act so that, among other things, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant anytime they want to access email. But those updates aren't law yet, so the old statute still applies.
Warrants, as defined in the constitution, must cite specific papers, and specific places. You can't get a constitutionally aboveboard warrant to go "fishing".
Since the government is looking for unidentified persons who may be infringing, so that can then identify and prosecute, they really can't get a warrant.
This is intentional. The limitations on how warrants work were *intended* to frustrate magistrates and government agents.
Making it "easier" for them is how you lose your freedoms.
The IRS is using it in a legal sense, and they are wrong here. From a practical sense, one should not expect email to be confidential. From a legal aspect we should have that expectation.
I am not a lawyer, but this guy is, and he illustrates well how email is not legally private.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If postal mail passes through an IRS person's hands for some legal reason, I believe they are legally entitled to read all the postcards in your mail, as there is no expectation of privacy on them, given that they're postcards. Email is the same way: the contents are naked, written on the side of the packets for anyone on a given network segment to view if the traffic comes their way. Just as we put mail in envelopes, we should encrypt our email if it's not for anyone and everyone to read if they happen to be standing "near" it when it goes by.