In an excellently written article by Ashby Jones, published in the Law Blog of the Wall Street Journal, he asks very simply:
“Is it kosher for a law enforcement agency to, pursuant to a lawfully granted search warrant, search your Gmail account without telling you? ”
The answer is a simple “yes.” The government has absolutely no obligation to notify an email service subscriber before the government conducts a search of your email. This is according to federal judge Michael Mosman of Portland, Oregon.
Parts of the decision, written with amazing clearity and to the point, are reprinted here:
“The Fourth Amendment protects our homes from unreasonable searches and seizures, requiring that, absent special circumstances, the government obtain a search warrant based on probable cause before entering. . . . This is strong privacy protection for homes and the items within them in the physical world.”
Most Americans already know that.
“If a suspect leaves private documents at his mother’s house and the police obtain a warrant to search his mother’s house, they need only provide a copy of the warrant and a receipt to the mother, even though she is not the “owner” of the documents. (citations omitted). In such a case, it is irrelevant that the suspect had a greater privacy interest in the content of the documents than did his mother. When he left the documents in her possession he no longer has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their contents.”
The point of that paragraph is, don’t leave stuff where you wouldn’t want your mother, or anyone else for that matter, to see.
“Much of the reluctance to apply traditional notions of third party disclosure to the e-mail context seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the lack of privacy we all have in our e-mails. Some people seem to think that they are as private as letters, phone calls, or journal entries. The blunt fact is, they are not.”
A word to the wise. If you don’t want others to see it, don’t write it in an email.
