IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant

IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant
news.cnet.com

The nation-wide precedent is they can access anything older than 180 days without a warrant, which for IRS's purposes is basically anything that would be relevant to a criminal tax prosecution (there is no statute of limitations on willful tax evasion or fraud).

Should we have privacy rights in our e-mails and personal messages? I think so. But the Constitution doesn't protect that, any more than it protects "one's papers" if those papers are left on the premises of a third party.[1] Not everything that is a good idea must be necessitated by the Constitution.

[1] Wikipedia's article on "expectation of privacy" is pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy ("In general, one cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy in things held out to the public."). If you understand how SMTP works, it's hard to argue that it's a private means of communication. You send a clear-text message to a publically-accessible service that is empowered to forward the message to other publically-accessible servers if necessary.

The crux of the matter is "knowing exposure to third parties." So you have an expectation of privacy in sealed postal mail, but not say post cards or anything printed on the outside of envelopes. While a postal service as a matter of course can't read what's in peoples' sealed letter mail, e-mail is sent in plain text and can be seen by any intermediary SMTP server as well as system administrators of the sending and target mail servers. That's just the nature of the protocol.

Moreover, the fact that the U.S. Postal Service is an agency of the government puts it under heightened scrutiny as compared to e-mail providers who are private parties. The fact that people would be horrified if the U.S. Postal Service were tearing open envelopes and scanning mail to send targeted catalogs, etc, to people but accept Google, etc, doing the same thing as a matter of course really cuts at the knees of the argument that people have the same "expectation of privacy" in their e-mail as they do their letter mail.

"Reasonable expectation of privacy" doesn't have an implicit "only as against the government." If you're knowingly exposing the contents to Google and Microsoft to scan, you can't claim to have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in the contents.