No Privacy For Web-based Email

Your email posted on any Internet service can be searched by the government without a warrant -- If the communication in an online account is older than 180 days, it is not protected. Either clean old email off web servers or lose your privacy.

The government still needs a warrant to search email archived on your computer.

Several on-line companies, including Google, are supporting legislation to prohibit the government from accessing any of your emails without a warrant. The Obama Administration is fighting this effort.


Justice Dept. to Congress: Don’t Saddle 4th Amendment on Us

By David Kravets

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.

A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.

The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.

But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way.

The rest of this is posted at Wired.com