This is good news and bad news:
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.
I assume the good news here is obvious. The bad news is that I had no idea this was even in question. Go ahead, call me an idiot. But I didn’t know that the Stored Communications Act or any other act even colorably provided the federal government with the right to retrieve personal email, regardless of where it’s stored, without probable cause and a valid search warrant. Jeebus.
