This is the quote from a federal judge in Portland on a recent case concerning the question of whether a governmental agency must provide notice to a consumer/email subscriber before they search the stored email records saved at the service provider. Obviously, the judge determined that there is a significantly reduced -- if any -- reasonable expectation of privacy in those records.
Here the note from the Wall Street Journal.
And here is a longer quote that is quite instructive from the case on how we treat electronic messages -- like mail in transit or like mail that you left in a relatrive's house. Depending on the treatment, one has a privacy expectation. The other doesnt.
"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.
When a person uses the Internet, however, the user’s actions are no longer in his or her physical home; in fact he or she is not truly acting in private space at all. The user is generally accessing the Internet with a network account and computer storage owned by an ISP like Comcast or NetZero. All materials stored online, whether they are e-mails or remotely stored documents, are physically stored on servers owned by an ISP. When we send an e-mail or instant message from the comfort of our own homes to a friend across town the message travels from our computer to computers owned by a third party, the ISP, before being delivered to the intended recipient. Thus, “private” information is actually being held by third-party private companies."
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