print:Your Private E-mail Messages and You | Human Rights |Axisoflogic.com

On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government's request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case. In their request, the government argued that they have a right to read stored copies of your email.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

The definition of invasion of privacy, as found in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constituion, has been interpreted by the courts as follows:

"Governmental power to protect the privacy interests of its citizens by penalizing publication or authorizing causes of action for publication implicates directly First Amendment rights. Privacy is a concept composed of several aspects. As a tort concept, it embraces at least four branches of protected interests,that is ...

Protection from "unreasonable intrusion upon one's seclusion"
Protection from "appropriation of one's name or likeness"
Protection from "publicity given to one's private life," and
Protection from "publicity which unreasonably places one in a false light before the public."

Regarding these protections, Find Law for Legal Professionals notes:

"It should be noted that we do not have here the question of the protection of one's privacy from governmental invasion."

In a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1963, (Katz v. United States) the court stated that the government could not invade the contents of Katz' private conversation on a payphone. The Court stated that the Fourth Amendment forbids the government to make unreasonable searches and seizures of "persons, house, places and effects." In doing so, the court adopted two tests:

Did you think what you were doing was private and
Is society willing to accept your belief as objectively reasonable?

In the case of the U.S. vs. Warshak, the government argued that the 4th Amendment does not protect us from their seizure of our e-mails messages and they don't need a court order to seize them. They argued that users of ISPs don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. They also argued that one cannot expect privacy after an email account has been abandoned.

They argued that the government is not restricted by the 4th Amendment because those using an ISP have agreed to the ISP's Terms of Service (TOS). The TOS and Privacy Policies of many ISPs permits the ISP to monitor their user's activities to prevent fraud. In agreeing to these Terms of Service, the user admits that they have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" therefore, according to the U.S. Government, their information is up for grabs - just as much as someone who states something in a public broadcast forfeits his/her right to privacy of what he or she said. Take a look at Yahoo!'s privacy policy, for example. Excerpts read (and who ever really reads them!) :

When you register with Yahoo! and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us.

Yahoo! automatically receives and records information from your computer and browser, including your IP address, Yahoo! cookie information, software and hardware attributes, and the page you request.

We respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims.

We believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of Yahoo!'s terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.

Yahoo! may update this policy. We will notify you about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to the primary email address specified in your Yahoo! account or by placing a prominent notice on our site.

The first thing to note of course is that we are not "anonymous" to Yahoo! The second is that they record and store our information. The third is that they they "respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process". Fourth, they claim they do all of this to protect us and finally they claim the right to update this policy. The U.S. Government is now arguing that they don't even have to have a court order to penetrate ISPs like Yahoo!, read and use our private communications in our e-mail messages.

The remaining question is:

"Why does the U.S. Government want the right to information we write in our e-mail messages, a record of the websites we visit and our other internet activities?"

With the complicity of the corporate media, the government has been conditioning the people to believe they need access to this information to protect us from criminal and terrorist threats. So in order to monitor the activities of criminals and "terrorists", they want us to believe that they need to be able to access to all our personal communications without even obtaining a court order to do so? Of course such a claim begs credibility. The U.S. Government has been steadily developing an intelligence infrastructure that would serve well a totalitarian police state in the United States. When the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the full panel hearing on October 8, 2007 they advanced the government's latest aggressive move to know who we are, where we live, what we write, read and what we think.

Read the Bio and Additional Articles by Les Blough, Editor

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