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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."
Keep knock'n back that cool-aid
to be watched by the Government.
Does the same logic mean that the government can not reject FOI requests for emails and can not redact anything in emails?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
they would read them all and deal with lawsuits/getting warrants later...
If you can sniff the network and easily read what I sent then fine. If I secure my emails so they don't appear in plain text then I think you do. If you secure your communication then you should require a warrant, because otherwise anyone could read what I send and I should have no expectation of privacy with my communications.
And the entirety of the 4th amendment is eliminated by storing your data on somebody else's system since it's no longer considered part of YOUR "persons, houses, papers, and effects" Still like "the cloud"?
It ends when you start sending prosecutors to jail for misconduct.
People keep claiming that they want to keep their guns because they need to protect themselves if their rights are taken away by the government...
HELLO???? At what point do you start defending yourselves? Your rights are being slowly stripped away and have been over the course of the last 30 years, and nobody does anything?
Even when the Stormtroopers are patrolling the streets, and curfew after dark is in place and people are afraid to speak against the government, or talk on their phones, with your neighbors turning each other in for 'treason'... you'll all still be sitting on your guns waiting for the government to take away your rights.
Until they actually do something with those newfound "powers" there won't be much uproar. As long as the searches/seizures are discrete, everyone is happy because "it wont happen to them".
I think you got that backwards, or forgot the /sarcasm tag:
Searches by government are by definition unreasonable, thus they need a warrent.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
"Pentagon spokesman George Little said, 'We have repeatedly stated that . . . our forces were unable to reach it in time to intervene to stop the attacks.'
These are essentially the same people who had solid intel that could have prevented the 9/11/2001 attacks, but did nothing with it.
Considering recent history, believing a word these vile fucks say is suckerdom to the n-th degree.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Safety deposit boxes are different since you have a lock on it.
If I simply give you an unsealed packet of papers, I am assuming the risk you'll had those over to the government if they ask you for them even if I ask you not to. There's no 4th amendment protection under those circumstances. This is analogous to using a web mail provider like gmail, hotmail, etc. where you're asking them to store plain text emails. You've arguably lost the 4th amendment protections in this case. Any protections are statutory, not constitutional.
Safety deposit boxes are different since you have a lock on it.
If I simply give you an unsealed packet of papers, I am assuming the risk you'll had those over to the government if they ask you for them even if I ask you not to. There's no 4th amendment protection under those circumstances. This is analogous to using a web mail provider like gmail, hotmail, etc. where you're asking them to store plain text emails.
OK, then go access my gmail account and post all the content therein online.
Oh, wait, you can't, because that account has a fucking lock on it, that only I (and Google, supposedly) have a key to.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It ends when prosecutors start sending prosecutors to jail for misconduct.
FTFY, and identified the real problem at the same time.
If self-policing worked, we wouldn't have need for police, you know?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Hell, Boston proved that the Fourth Amendment is no obstacle to searching people's houses without a warrant. Not only did the people there let them do it, but they were happy to let them do it.
Yes. And there's no violation of the 4th Amendment if you willingly wave that right and say, "Come right on in and look around!" The 4th is only about coerced searches.
Slashdot: where obvious jokes are lost.
Voice over phone line is in "clear", and ATT could listen to it. Yet it is still required to have warrant to bug the line. I fail to see what is different with my emails. They are traveling "the infrastructure" in clear, that doesn't mean they are intended to be read by every bystander. As a matter of fact, somebody got a very harsh sentence for intruding onto S. Palin's mailboxes and revealing the content of these emails, so it seems to be quite clear and settled that emails are not to be considered public by default.
The Sarah Palin email hack occurred on September 16, 2008.... The incident was ultimately prosecuted in a U.S. federal court as four felony crimes punishable by up to 50 years in federal prison.[3][4] The charges were three felonies: identity theft, wire fraud, and anticipatory obstruction of justice; and one optional as felony or misdemeanor: intentionally accessing an account without authorization.
If emails etc are not expected to be private, why is it a felony crime to access someone else's email?
When your government starts telling you that, it is a sign that you are having a crisis and need to swap out your government for a new one before it becomes impossible to do so.
It may already be too late.
Corporations are people, humans aren't.
Money is speech, writing isn't.
Democracy has sold out.
Didn't you get the memo?
movetoamend.org if you don't like it.
Bullshit - my papers and effects are my papers and effects, regardless of where I keep them.
Could you imagine how hard it would be for banks to sell safety deposit space, if there was no guarantee other people weren't able to rifle through your shit?
It comes down to the legal argument over an expectation of privacy. You expect a bank to keep the contents of a safety deposit box private. Arguing unencrypted emails, facebook posts, tweets, etc.
False equivalence - An email is a direct communication between two parties, whereas facebook posts and tweets are publicly posted.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Of all the bullshit propagated in the most recent drive for gun control the one thing that always strikes me as the most outrageous and unproven is the claim that the NRA is a "gun manufacturer's rights organization."
I'm sure this started out the way that most left wing propaganda starts out, with some ideology theorist claiming that because the NRA isn't a "hunting" organization, they really only represent the evil capitalist gun manufacturers who make non-hunting guns.
While I reject that line of reasoning in totality, it's the only logical way that the claim they are only a "gun manufacturer's rights organization" even makes sense. Anything else just seem either totally illogical (ie, why support gun makers if no citizen can buy their product?) or just an attempt to paint gun makers as some kind of evil Wall street plot.
I think what pisses off gun control advocates is how well organized and vertically integrated gun rights support is among gun owners, sportsmen and businesses engaged in gun-related products. Gun owners support the NRA, gun makers support the NRA, ammo makers support them and retailers support them. In many cases, a gun maker will SUBSIDIZE an NRA membership if you aren't a member and buy their product. Many retailers support the "round up for the NRA" program making it easy for buyers to round-up their purchase price to the nearest dollar and send it to the NRA. And the businesses put their money where their mouth is and put millions of dollars into the NRA to keep our gun rights secure.
Nobody would say boo if, for example, all the PC makers made it easy to support the EFF the way that gun makers do for the NRA.
The GP said:
when the government does it, that means that it is not unreasonable.
Richard Milhous Nixon (who was forced to resign from the presidency of the United States due to his many flagrantly illegal acts) said:
Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
Please don't speak for me and please don't include me in the group "everyone". I don't think the GP was being fucking retarded and counterproductive. Even though this is Slashdot, the GP's wit was not lost to all readers.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Wouldn't the solution to "the e-mail problem" be to store your e-mail in a country with decent privacy protections and access it using SSL/TLS? It won't won't prevent the US government from accessing your e-mail if they really want to, but it is a start.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
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
In order to exercise your First Amendment rights, you are subject to a three day waiting period. You may only use media types approved by the Government. Discourses conducted through media not sanctioned is a felony.
etc.
OK, then go access my gmail account and post all the content therein online.
Oh, wait, you can't, because that account has a fucking lock on it, that only I (and Google, supposedly) have a key to.
But Google has access to them. And the Third Party Doctrine, endorsed by the US Supreme Court, doesn't extend your 4th Amendment rights to information of yours held and accessible by others.
If you give me something which would incriminate you in the clear and I put it in a safe (say a letter in an unsealed envelope), all that's needed to require me (under the 4th) to turn that letter over to the government is a subpoena, not a search warrant. If it was in your safe, it would require a search warrant. Having an email in plain text sitting on someone else's hard drive is analogous.
I'm not saying I agree with this doctrine (I don't), but that's the current state of the law in the US: once your information leaves your possession you've pretty much lost 4th Amendment protections to it from anyone else who obtains it turning it over.