In its current form, ECPA protects emails from government snooping for 180 days. When the law was initially drawn up in 1986, email providers routinely removed emails from their servers a month or two after they were delivered; users would generally download the messages they intended to keep. Whatever remains on an email server after 180 days is fair game for government to access, with just a subpoena—not a warrant.
Today, ubiquitous cloud-based email systems like Gmail, which offer gigabytes of storage for free, allow the average user to keep his or her messages—and calendars, contacts, notes, and even location data—on a provider’s servers indefinitely.
The ECPA Amendments Act would require law enforcement to get a warrant to access server-hosted information, no matter how old, and would require the government to notify an individual that his or her information was accessed within 10 days, with certain exceptions.
But law enforcement officials expressed opposition to some of the bill’s proposed changes, arguing that its requirement for criminal warrants could leave civil litigators without access to important electronic information.
“The bill in its current form poses significant risk to the American public by impeding the ability of the SEC and other civil law enforcement agencies to investigate and uncover financial fraud and other unlawful conduct,” said Andrew Ceresney, director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
I never knew that after a few months, government could pull all my emails with just a subpoena from a friendly judge. I wonder if FEC investigations into political support for candidates and elections law are routinely opened to pull the emails of people like Rush, Levin, and political bloggers. No wonder Petraeus told Broadwell to use the draft folder.
In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.
Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.
Government officials had warned for months that this type of standoff was inevitable as technology companies like Apple and Google embraced tougher encryption. The case, coming after several others in which similar requests were rebuffed, prompted some senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials to advocate taking Apple to court, several current and former law enforcement officials said.
While that prospect has been shelved for now, the Justice Department is engaged in a court dispute with another tech company, Microsoft. The case, which goes before a federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday and is being closely watched by industry officials and civil liberties advocates, began when the company refused to comply with a warrant in December 2013 for emails from a drug trafficking suspect. Microsoft said federal officials would have to get an order from an Irish court, because the emails were stored on servers in Dublin.
What this tells you is they have been pulling texts all along, off the books, from inside the company. Now that it is encrypted, whoever they had in the company pulling it couldn’t get it so they went through channels, only to find that even the company doesn’t have the access. That is a big argument for Apple products, though I would be surprised if there isn’t a backdoor somewhere. If there isn’t they will have one made soon. Already LE Intel is reviewing Tim Cook’s surveillance file for blackmail material. He may even have slept with a woman once at Burning Man.
I believe the other case just came down, the Judge ruled that if they can access it in the US with an Admin and Pass, they have to turn it over, no matter where the server is.
All your secrets are belong to us.
Apocalypse cometh™
That old and no longer needed 3rd Amendment needs some explaining. It’s there because quartering troops in peoples homes was a burden on the folks stuck with them and the big one was to keep an eye on those individuals. The 3rd amendment is in essence, being violated by all this spying on the us Citizens. Imagine (well you don’t have to imagine) that people in the government can observe and hear all that their enemies and competitors are doing. The IRS is being used to squelch dissent, and interfere in campaigns they don’t agree with. We will be hard pressed to get out of this tyranny without bloodshed.
Not only that, But I wouldn’t be surprised LE blackmails some people now to take over and establish observation posts in their homes, when they want them there and can’t get them any other way. The observation post with a sightline to the house isn’t a maybe – it is procedure wherever possible, and in many cases there are multiples.
The surveillance state is a scary thing, and I fear real democracy, (if even a vestige of it remains), will not last LE’s increasing movement toward intelligence techniques instead of investigative techniques. Atkisson’s planted classified documents and Petraeus’s takedown are what play over and again in my head. If they would take out a nice woman like her, and a hero like Petraeus, the peons like us are only saved by our meaninglessness.