![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearBreaking News on EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment | Electronic Frontier Foundation:
In those early days of email, not well understood by the general public (nevermind the stodgy isolated conservatve judiciary), the decision from a literalistic "wiretapping means intercepting on a wire" judge meant, "no". The feds could take the equipment and read everything and you'd be none-the-wiser, even though your own private communications were never directly the subject of the warrant (or even suspicion in any degree).
20 years later, thanks also to ubiquitous email, the EFF has finally gotten the judiciary to recognize what we uber-geeks have always known: email is private communication between parties, regardless of the "service providers" involved on either end, or hardware involved in the transport of its bits.
Hurray for "common sense" to finally become common.
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.This has been something the EFF has been fighting for since its founding. In the Secret Service raid incident, started in 1990, legally resolved in 1993, one of the judgements asked for was the interpretation that the government seizing equipment that housed unread emails (in that case, the Illuminati BBS system which I was a subscriber of at the time) constituted "wiretapping", since it meant the government could read the email before the intended user could.
In those early days of email, not well understood by the general public (nevermind the stodgy isolated conservatve judiciary), the decision from a literalistic "wiretapping means intercepting on a wire" judge meant, "no". The feds could take the equipment and read everything and you'd be none-the-wiser, even though your own private communications were never directly the subject of the warrant (or even suspicion in any degree).
20 years later, thanks also to ubiquitous email, the EFF has finally gotten the judiciary to recognize what we uber-geeks have always known: email is private communication between parties, regardless of the "service providers" involved on either end, or hardware involved in the transport of its bits.
Hurray for "common sense" to finally become common.
