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

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

#11

Post by rayiner »

unethical_ban wrote: post #10
rayiner wrote: post #3

This statement: "Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers says that Americans enjoy 'generally no privacy' in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications" is entirely consistent with the existence of Warshack. Warshack covers the Sixth Circuit, which includes the following states: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The IRS is bound by this precedent in those…

I understand how IMAPS, SMTPS, and SSL work. Not clear text...

It's still exposed in clear text to the mail provider.

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

#12

Post by alexanderh »

rayiner wrote: post #7
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now that gmail has ssl access, this is no longer true, right?

Gmail has SSL to Google's e-mail server. If you e.g. send a mail to someone using Outlook, it's sent in clear text. And at both ends it's scanned to deliver everyone involved targeted advertising. "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…

And this is why you always use something along the lines of PGP end to end.

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

#13

Post by AjithAntony »

unethical_ban wrote: post #10
rayiner wrote: post #3

This statement: "Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers says that Americans enjoy 'generally no privacy' in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications" is entirely consistent with the existence of Warshack. Warshack covers the Sixth Circuit, which includes the following states: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The IRS is bound by this precedent in those…

I understand how IMAPS, SMTPS, and SSL work. Not clear text...

I think the confusion you and I share is that the topic of the precedent is mail that is physically stored on a 3rd party's server. The transport mechanisms are irrelevant.

Now, what if you used a service like gmail, but made sure that you deleted all your mail before they aged to 180 days. What if the mails are not actually deleted from the underlying storage, but just not presented to you. If the mails still "exist" could they be used against you? Would google give them up? Was there an expectation of actual deletion?

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

#15

Post by Jach »

When will "does not give the option to encrypt all outgoing correspondence with my PGP public key" become as embarrassing for an important website as "doesn't have an SSL cert" or "emails/stores passwords in plaintext"?

Edit: added word "outgoing" for pedant below. ;) Of course it'd be nice to get their public key too if you had to correspond back without going through say their https website.

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

#16

Post by disposition2 »

rayiner wrote: post #5
mtgx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can they access mail without a warrant that is older than 180 days? If not how the hell is that e-mail law constitutional?

The EFF has a good page on the principles underlying "reasonable expectation of privacy." See: https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/privacy . 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' seale…

So would an attachment to an email (say a zipset of text files) fall under the category of reasonable expectation of privacy?

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

#17

Post by will_brown »

rayiner wrote: post #3

This statement: "Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers says that Americans enjoy 'generally no privacy' in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications" is entirely consistent with the existence of Warshack. Warshack covers the Sixth Circuit, which includes the following states: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The IRS is bound by this precedent in those…

Nice analysis. I tend to think the evolution of expectation of privacy from regular mail to email is similar to the evolution of expectation of privacy from land-line phones to cell phones.

That is under the 4th Amendment land-line phone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy; therefore, Gov. must obtain a search warrant to use evidence gathered from such sources against the criminal defendant. Yet, Courts define cell phones as little more than radios, and one does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy of radio transmissions, so evidence gathered can be used against a criminal defendant without being obtained by warrant.

So, right or wrong, I think the whole frame is similar to mail and email, of course emails are not defined as radio transmissions. Now all that said, between the Bush and Obama administrations reasonable expectation of privacy has been eroded (and as a result the 4th Amendment), and de facto there is no expectation of privacy over anything except maybe what is in your head.

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

#18

Post by Spooky23 »

rayiner wrote: post #3

This statement: "Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers says that Americans enjoy 'generally no privacy' in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications" is entirely consistent with the existence of Warshack. Warshack covers the Sixth Circuit, which includes the following states: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The IRS is bound by this precedent in those…

So by your reasoning, if I mail you a postcard, and you put the postcard in a locked container placed inside of the trunk of a rental car, it is OK for the police to bypass your access controls and read the postcard?

How you transmitted or handled something at a point in time is not relevant to it's status at rest.

This issue here is that the government asserts that email is a communications system only. The problem is that while it does enable people to communicate, it also serves as a filing system to many email users. The law as written in 1986 didn't forsee 25GB mailboxes on O365 or Google with the equivalent of many file cabinets worth of memos, etc.

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

#19

Post by linschn »

rayiner wrote: post #3

This statement: "Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers says that Americans enjoy 'generally no privacy' in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications" is entirely consistent with the existence of Warshack. Warshack covers the Sixth Circuit, which includes the following states: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The IRS is bound by this precedent in those…

By contrast, in France for example, secrecy of correspondence is the default. It has been explicitely extended in 2004 to e-mail, but the law as it was after a change in 1988 certainly already covered that. Tampering with e-mail is thus punished the same way as tampering with a physical letter. Being an agent of the government constitutes aggravating circumstances.

Circumventing those protections requires the intervention of an independent (as in independent from the executive) judge.

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