All of this from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) newsletter, the EFFector:
(note: some of the URLs’ text at the end of the articles were shortened to fit)
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:
6th_circuit_decision_upholding_injunction.pdfFor EFF’s resources on the case, including its amicus brief:
warshak_v_usaFor this release:
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php#005321
Judge Orders FBI to Release NSL Abuse Records
New Evidence of Misuse Prompts Immediate Response in EFF FOIA Lawsuit
Washington, D.C. On Monday, a judge ordered the FBI to finally release agency records about its abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans’ personal information. The ruling came just a day after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the judge to immediately respond in its lawsuit over agency delays.
EFF sued the FBI in April for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the misuse of NSLs as revealed in a Justice Department report. This week, the Washington Post uncovered more evidence of abuse, and EFF urged the judge Thursday to force the FBI to stop stalling the release of its records on the deeply flawed program.
“The reports we’ve seen so far about NSL abuse are just the tip of the iceberg,” said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “FBI officials told the Washington Post that there have likely been several thousand total instances of misuse. Americans deserve answers about this scandal and
how the FBI has abused its power to spy on ordinary citizens.”Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI can use NSLs to get private records about anyone’s domestic phone calls, emails and financial transactions without any court approval — as long as it claims the information could be relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation. Without a judge’s oversight, the law is ripe for the abuse that has been uncovered in these recent reports.
“The law itself is the source of the problem. It’s time for Congress to repeal these expanded NSL powers and protect Americans from this abuse of authority,” said Hofmann.
The judge’s order requires the FBI to process 2500 pages of NSL-related records by July 5, and then 2500 pages every 30 days thereafter.
For the judge’s order:
http://www.eff.org/flag/nsl/bates_order.pdfFor EFF’s supplemental memo:
http://eff.org/flag/nsl/supplemental_memo.pdfFor the Washington Post article on NSLs:
http://www.washingtonpost.comFor this release:
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php#005317
FBI’s Abuse of USA PATRIOT Act Even Worse Than We Thought
According to the Washington Post, “An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, emails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.”
That report painted a horror story, including massive abuses of so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). Before PATRIOT, the FBI could only use NSLs to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or spies. But under PATRIOT, the FBI can use them to get private records about anybody without any court approval, as long as it believes the information could be relevant to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation.
>From the moment PATRIOT was passed, EFF said the NSL power was unconstitutional and ripe for abuse, and these new revelations make it more clear than ever that Congress should repeal PATRIOT’s expansion of NSL powers and reform the USA PATRIOT Act as a whole.
Take action now and tell Congress to stop the abuse of surveillance powers:
https://secure.eff.org/site/AdvocacyFor this post:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005314.php