By John Leyden for The Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
For 20 years, long before the introduction of knee-jerk law enforcement powers ushered in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Stored Communications Act (SCA) has been used by government agents to carry out secret searches and seizures of stored email, without requiring a warrant. A case brought by Steven Warshak challenged this practice.
In an important ruling, a district court said in July 2006 that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment by allowing secret, warrantless searches of email stored with a third party. The government appealed arguing, in part, that the Fourth Amendment doesn't protect emails at all when they are stored with an ISP or a webmail provider such as Hotmail or Gmail.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, upholding the lower court's decision and affirming that users have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" about content in emails stored on a remote host.
It's unlikely that the US government will let matters rest there and further appeals are likely.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supported Warshak in the case, has published a number of papers giving more background on the case here.
© The Register 2007
