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

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-can-trust-us dept.

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."

22 of 457 comments (clear)

  1. "split" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Keep knock'n back that cool-aid

  2. Land of the free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    to be watched by the Government.

    1. Re:Land of the free by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why isn't all email encrypted yet?

      All we need is email programs that perform a Diffie-Hellman key exchange during the first few emails you exchange with anybody (add an attachment the the email which the user never sees). After two or three emails exchanged, you're encrypted. Why isn't it being done?

      I'm guessing the men in black SUVs pay visits to anybody who attempts it. What's the explanation if not...?

      --
      No sig today...
    2. Re:Land of the free by netwarerip · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ....... What's the explanation if not...?

      Likely because 99.86% of the people that use email can't even pronounce Diffie-Hellman, let alone know what it is.

    3. Re:Land of the free by defaria · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because it's difficult to understand and difficult to use and most people don't know and don't care about encryption. You don't need to put on your beany hat and start conspiracy theories with men in black SUVs - I tried to use encryption and by and large the people I tried it with were nothing but confused and couldn't see the value in it.

    4. Re:Land of the free by quarrelinastraw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because many email providers -- such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc -- want to read your email to serve you ads. Encryption runs counter to the profit motive.

  3. Fourth Amendment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

    1. Re:Fourth Amendment by zlives · · Score: 5, Funny

      when the government does it, that means that it is not unreasonable.

    2. Re:Fourth Amendment by funwithBSD · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
    3. Re:Fourth Amendment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    4. Re:Fourth Amendment by netwarerip · · Score: 5, Informative

      Coming from a former bank guy, they don't have keys to the customer's lock. They do, however, have a maintenance guy with a powerful drill.

  4. FOI Requests? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Oh wait! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maybe we should create an amendment to the constitution that makes this issue more clear regarding illegal search.

    Oh, wait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

    well then maybe we should create a law that clarifies the position a bit further

    Oh, wait.. http://www.justice.gov/opcl/privstat.htm

    ok, well maybe we will have courts decide that emails are personal property

    Oh, wait... http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_emails_personal_property

    when/where does it end?

    1. Re:Oh wait! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It ends when you start sending prosecutors to jail for misconduct.

    2. Re:Oh wait! by CanHasDIY · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
  6. Second Amendment by tekrat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
    1. Re:Second Amendment by Zcar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Second Amendment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      This was modded up?

      The searches in Boston weren't "consensual" by any definition of the word. Luckily, people took videos of the police, even if in their disarmed state they couldn't stand up to them. The police were showing up with a SWAT team, banging on the door, holding the person who answered outside at gunpoint, and searching the houses. On the street even more SWAT team members waited in a tank with guns aimed at people visible through windows - including the person taking the video.

      But go ahead, explain to me how that's not a "coerced" search.

      And then the people cheered the police over this behavior - literally, there were people in the streets thanking the police for stripping them of their Constitutional rights. It's absolutely sickening and a perfect example of why the OP is absolutely right. People need to stand up for their rights against a police force that does not hesitate to use excessive force against their own population.

  7. Saw this on the Web today by judoguy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

    Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

    --
    Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
  8. Re:Depends by CanHasDIY · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    So basically your stance is - if you mail a letter in a sealed envelope, it's fair game, but if the letter is written in code, it's not.

    Strange philosophy you have there.

    --
    An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  9. Key management by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    All we need is email programs that perform a Diffie-Hellman key exchange during the first few emails you exchange with anybody

    As always, the hardest part of practical cryptography is key management. What you are talking about is opportunistic encryption. It won't actually prevent decryption but it will force the attacker to do an active Man-In-The-Middle attack, which can be detected after the fact.

    This should be the default mode of operation for PGP mail. Whenever you send an email it should append your public key into the headers. As soon as your interlocutor responds, he can encrypt his reply and sign with his own public key, so all messages but the first one are encrypted. It should just work, nothing should be exposed to the user except a small keylock, which he can click if he's so inclined and verify things like key thumbprint etc. to detect tampering and/or explore full PGP functionality.

    For an environment such as webmail, this still offers zero security: you either keep the private key on the server, or you do the encryption operations on the clients's side. Since Javascript run-time a href=http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/>is malleable it's very easy to retrieve the private key or the plain text back from the user when the government asks you.

  10. Second Amendment ... by pollarda · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.