Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
We don't have reasonable expectation of privacy to our electronic communications, but apparently the govt does. On top of that we pay for it.
The US tax code needs a massive overhaul and simplification, and the IRS simply needs to be dismantled.
Maybe I should send that as an email so the IRS will read it.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
If the IRS can read email without a warrant, then it should be EASY to convict nearly every overpaid CEO in the USA who hides their money via creative accounting and tax dodges. Why have there been no convictions then for the 2008 Economic Crash where the fatcat bankers stole trillions and then got free billions to cover their losses? Surely that money can be traced and found and certain wall street types convicted if the IRS is reading *their* emails.
Oh, but they aren't -- because those people own the government. Because those people are "too big to fail". Because those people have friends in high places and lots of lawyers to defend them. They aren't easy targets, even though they are big targets.
No no, prosecutors want easy convictions from people with no means to defend themselves, using the same tactics as high school bullies -- pick on the weak.
The IRS reading your mail? Pfft. It's to keep the proles in line. The elite have their own laws and their own justice that flows from power. The rest of us just try to survive under the heel of their boot.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I agree. The difference is in the meaning of "expect". 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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
"Are they? I haven't heard a good argument on why anyone should expect an email to be private. It's read and scanned by countless systems just to get it to its destination."
No, it isn't.
The header is, but that's what the header is for. No intermediate system (or email server, for that matter) has any reason to read or "scan" anything in the body of the email. There just isn't any valid technical reason to do that.
I should point out that as far as "header" information is concerned (i.e., signalling required for source-destination communications), telephone lines are absolutely no different. There is source and destination information that is perfectly analogous to email headers, and then there is the "body" of the message: the actual voice content.
Yet people DO expect phone conversations to be private. So explain to me why there should be any difference.
"obviously you have nothing to hide..."
Have you ever needed to pee or poop when you were in a group of people? Did you just do it on the spot or what?
Ezekiel 23:20
It seems that a key tenet of authoritarianism is the assumption that privacy is not legitimate.
Without the information provided by putting that into practice, it would be much more difficult to micromanage daily life. An income tax in particular is a control freak's wet dream: it provides both carrots and sticks that can be used to manipulate behavior. Unlike impersonal excise taxes or sales taxes, where the only relevant information is a dollar amount, an income tax inherently requires getting to know the mundane details of a person's life. You have to know who they are, what they do, what they've been up to lately, and you need invasive powers to make sure they aren't cheating or otherwise lying to you.
There is a reason why the Constitution had to be amended to allow for an income tax. As far as I know, that reason wasn't because the Founding Fathers never heard of such a concept.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein