US DOJ Say They Don't Need Warrants For E-Mail, Chats

gannebraemorr writes "The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don't need a search warrant to review Americans' e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal. Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they're not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail."

Comments

Re:Second Amendment ...

[Ol Olsoc]

The gun issue not withstanding, the Government's attack on the Second Amendment is horrific and sets up really bad precidence for the Fourth Amendment, First Amendment, as well as others.

FOURTH AMENDMENT Just think: In order to exercise your Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure, the Government needs to perform a background check on you to ensure that you are an upstanding citizen.

FIRST AMENDMENT

Thank you for bringing in guns. That always elevates conversation to a higher level.

Perhaps there should be no background checks for anyone anytime. After all, most of those security clearances are held by honest Patriotic law abiding Americans. And what's the chance that that babysitter or sports coach is a pedophile? Not very high, right?

You see, if going for a security clearance, or coaching job whenever working for children, you are not required to take a background check. But you won't get the job, and you won't coach. I dealt with this in youth sports. We had fathers who wanted to coach, but refused to take a state police background check. And yeah, I heard all about Big Brother. When there is an instrument that I can legally carry that I can kill people with very easily and efficiently and quickly, I'd sure like to know that the person is stable enough to carry it without deciding to reorganize the place he or she works for.

Every one of us is in a lot of databases, be it Social Security, Workers Compensation, the IRS, Military/VA, shopping card, and a lot of others for perfectly legitimate reasons.

But the Extreme Gun movement - I call it that because I am a law abiding gun owner who believes that law abiding is very important part of owning firearms - is advancing very quickly towards anarchism.

In similar fashion, a lot of us don't care to encrypt our email because there isn't anything in there that needs encryption. Anyone who has any dealings that shouldn't be "out there" should not ever use the internet for that. It is not designed for security purposes, it was designed to be as failproof as possible, to allow communication over broken networks. That means your very private conversations don't just go to one place, they are on a lot of machines except in special circumstances, but the paradign is still true.