[kictanet] Fwd: EFF: Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches

[Alex Gakuru]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: WWWhatsup <joly at punkcast.com>
Date: Jun 19, 2007 3:36 AM
 Subject: [isoc-ny] EFF: Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches
To: isoc-ny at yahoogroups.com, discuss at isoc-ny.org

                                    Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release
 
 For Immediate Release: Monday, June 18, 2007
 
 Contact:
 
 Kevin Bankston
    Staff Attorney
    Electronic Frontier Foundation
    bankston at eff.org
    +1 415 436-9333 x126
 
 Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches
 
 Landmark Ruling Gives Email Same Constitutional Protections
 as Phone Calls
 
 San Francisco - The government must have a search warrant
 before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by
 email service providers, according to a landmark ruling
 Monday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  The court
 found that email users have the same reasonable expectation
 of privacy in their stored email as they do in their
 telephone calls -- the first circuit court ever to make
 that finding.
 
 Over the last 20 years, the government has routinely used
 the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) to secretly
 obtain stored email from email service providers without a
 warrant.  But today's ruling -- closely following the
 reasoning in an amicus brief filed the by the Electronic
 Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other civil liberties groups
 -- found that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment.
 
 "Email users expect that their Hotmail and Gmail inboxes
 are just as private as their postal mail and their
 telephone calls," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.
 "The government tried to get around this common-sense
 conclusion, but the Constitution applies online as well as
 offline, as the court correctly found.  That means that the
 government can't secretly seize your emails without a
 warrant."
 
 Warshak v. United States was brought in the Southern
 District of Ohio federal court by Steven Warshak to stop
 the government's repeated secret searches and seizures of
 his stored email using the SCA.  The district court ruled
 that the government cannot use the SCA to obtain stored
 email without a warrant or prior notice to the email
 account holder, but the government appealed that ruling to
 the 6th Circuit.  EFF served as an amicus in the case,
 joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center
 for Democracy & Technology.  Law professors Susan Freiwald
 and Patricia Bellia also submitted an amicus brief, and the
 case was successfully argued at the 6th Circuit by
 Warshak's counsel Martin Weinberg.
 
 For the full ruling in Warshak v. United States:
 http://eff.org/legal/cases/warshak_v_usa/ 6th_circuit_decision_upholding_injunction.pdf
 
 For EFF's resources on the case, including its amicus brief:
 http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/warshak_v_usa/
 
 For this release:
 http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php#005321
 
 About EFF
 
 The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil
 liberties organization working to protect rights in the
 digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and
 challenges industry and government to support free
 expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported
 organization and maintains one of the most linked-to
 websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/
 
 ----------------------------------------------------------
              WWWhatsup NYC
 http://pinstand.com -  http://punkcast.com
 ----------------------------------------------------------


       
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