The government must obtain a court warrant to require internet service providers to turn over stored e-mail to the authorities, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was the first time an appellate court said Americans had that Fourth Amendment protection.“The government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber’s e-mails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause” (.pdf), the appeals court ruled. The decision — one stop short of the Supreme Court — covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.Kevin Bankston, a privacy attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, applauded the decision. At issue in Warshak’s e-mail flap was a 1986 law that allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an internet service provider or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The appeals court said Tuesday that this part of the Stored Communications Act is unconstitutional.
“The Fourth Amendment must keep pace with the inexorable march of technological progress, or its guarantees will wither and perish,” the court ruled...more
2 comments:
Two words... Carnivore and NarusInsight...
Most should be aware of the FBI's Carnivore. NarusInsight: • Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the Internet)
• High-speed Packet processing performance, which enables it to sift through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet.
• Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real-time. That is it can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g. web browsers, instant messaging applications, email) and what they are doing with those applications (e.g. which web sites they have visited, what they have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities are connected to each other (e.g. compiling lists of people who visit a certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their emails).
• High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis.
-bobby-, really enjoyed your website, especially Road Carcass, Carved By Water, and of course Looking Out My Back Door
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