E-mail privacy to disappear?

E-mail privacy to disappear?
Mark Rasch, 2007-11-02

On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government's request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. At issue is whether the procedure whereby the government can subpoena stored copies of your e-mail -- similar to the way they could simply subpoena any physical mail sitting on your desk -- is unconstitutionally broad.

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-02
Anonymous

My guess is this is most likely a sign of things to come in the arena of computer/internet law....

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-02
Anonymous (1 replies)

So in the end we have to encrypt all our mails :). Better to choose long passwords so the hash is difficult to solve, but even that will probably not protect you in the end...

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Re: E-mail privacy to disappear? -- encrypt all our emails 2007-12-13
The Cryptographer

You can use a program like Gwebs Webmail Safety (disclaimer: i work for gwebs) to protect your email with asymmetrical encryption - there is no simple hash to crack, the government, even with supercomputers, would need to spend years on each individual email to decrypt it... and with the volume of e...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-04
Anonymous

So it appears that unless you operate your own email server, the government can read your email.

Perhaps we should all install our own email servers at home!...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-05
M.T.

I know for fact that this already occurs and without prior knowledge to anyone. The gov't. does what they want to regardless of the person. It is very wrong for them to take advantage of their powers. They think just because someone speaks out against what they do that they have the right to block e...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-05
Anonymous

Great commentary, Mark. This once again underscores the fact that, at a minimum, everyone should be using PGP or some other form of encryption, whenever possible (with regularly changing keys). It may not be foolproof, but it may be the only resort at this point....

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-05
Anonymous (1 replies)

Are you saying that no probable cause is required?...

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Re: E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-07
Mark D. Rasch

Constitutionally, a warrant and probable cause are only required if what you are doing constitutes a search and seizure which is an invasion of a "reasonable expectation of privacy." While certain STATUTES, e.g., SCA, and ECPA, and Title III provide procedures for obtaining or intercepting electron...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-05
Scott

Frankly what scares me more is I had to learn of this from The Register, an online publication from England.

Its becoming more and more obvious the government controls the media far too much. This happened before in Germany, I hope we don't fall down the same path....

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-06
Anonymous (1 replies)

What's interesting to me is how all this appears to be in direct conflict with the directions being taken with things such as medical information... HIPPA.

...

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Re: E-mail privacy to disappear? 2008-02-16
beenthere

The situation is much worse than all of you think. Our emails and our phone conversations are our thoughts. Assume that all emails and calls are monitored at all times. So now you know how was life under STAZI in East Germany, in Poland under martial law, or in other soviet block countries. But now ...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-07
Anonymous

Great article.

How would this apply to Canadians with Yahoo! or Google Mail accounts? As far as I know, most of the email servers are in the US. As someone who is not an American citizen, would there be any expectation of privacy for emails stored on US servers?...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-08
Anonymous

Very good commentary Mark. When you consider what the government has already been up to I.E. Requests from ISP's for search data, Telephone - NSA - Eavesdropping, it only seems natural that they would go after email. It seems anyone with a specialty in Constitutional Law will be busy in the next few...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-09
Anonymous

Let's take the same kind of reasoning a bit further: if the mailbox in front of your house is somehow accesible, the letters you receive can be legally viewed by anyone, because you can't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" under such circumstances. Scary....

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-10
Anonymous

Even if you have personally surrendered your expectation of privacy (to your employer, to your ISP), couldn't one argue that the employer/ISP (perhaps embodied as its leadership or shareholders?) has a reasonable expectation of privacy? If we assume "your" communications held on their servers are th...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-14
Anonymous

If the issue at hand is an expectation of privacy, would the provision of a expectation of privacy clause in the T&C of the email service provide the necessary protection?...

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State Statutes Allowing For Privacy Communicated by Electronic Means 2007-11-15
Jason

Great Article! I am doing a little research on a related topic and your post sparked my interest. I was reading a case this evening (Scott v. Beth Israel Med. Ctr., 2007 WL 3053351 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2007)) where the court noted two statutory provisions which essentially state that you don't waive you...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2007-11-21
Anonymous

I would like to pose a question, if a Mexico company with a server in Thailand and a US citizen buys this product, where does the sell take place and under what law? ...

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E-mail privacy to disappear? 2008-03-19
sageb1

we have better privacy rights in Canada.

these rights are better than the ability of our customs agents to prevent terrorists from getting into the US.

but to prevent the latter from happening, it'd be wise to respect the rights of Middle Eastern countries regarding their religious freedoms i....

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