Today's Washington Post is running an interesting article on the unique legal regime in the US related to law enforcement / intelligence access to e-mail stored by third parties. A bit ...

The Legal Tangles Of Data Collection - washingtonpost.com

... E-mail is a slightly different matter. The law makes a distinction between intercepting e-mail in transit and obtaining stored e-mail from a service provider's servers. The distinction made sense in the 1980s and early 1990s when downloaded e-mail often sat only on the user's computer. If the government wanted the records, it had to go to the e-mail recipient.

These days, most e-mail is held and stored by third parties. So the government claims the authority to read someone's most intimate communications, including stored chat sessions, by serving a subpoena -- no probable cause required. A person may never even know that this has been done, as there is no legal requirement for an Internet service provider to provide notice. In most cases where the government subpoenas the e-mail, it demands that the third party keep that fact confidential, at least for a while.

The same holds true for virtually any information held by a third party: phone company records that indicate who called you, when they called and how long the call lasted; Internet service provider records on what Web sites you visited, when and for how long; tollbooth records; security camera footage; records of emergency calls made from a car; supermarket purchase records. All that and more can be requested by the government with a search warrant, or sometimes with an administrative subpoena or other demand, frequently without judicial review....

Labels: law enforcement, national security, patriot act, privacy, surveillance, warrants