61–70 of 186 posts
If the government wants to read your email, it will. If it refrains from reading your email it's only because it doesn't find you interesting enough to go through the hassle of doing so.
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…
No, that's stupid. That's equivalent to claiming telephone calls aren't private, because they're transmitted in the clear by third party exchanges accessible to authorized users. (email servers generally aren't publicly accessible, rather they're only accessible to authorized (registered) users)
The extension of 4th amendment protections to telephone calls dates to a time when it was a direct analog connection between your phone and the other person's phone. But Google/Gmail is not just a dumb wire. It's an intermediate third party that can read your email and scan it to sell you ads.
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What if I FedEx a letter and a FedEx employee opens it and keeps a copy of it? (Replace FedEx with USPS if it makes a difference)
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to private carriers like FedEx or UPS. The expectation of privacy only extends to First Class USPS mail, under the consideration that extra protections are needed given that the USPS is an organ of the federal government and that USPS workers are bound by the 4th amendment just as any other agent of the government (and unlike private mail carriers!)
Now my next question is can someone force the third party to give up the information without a warrant? I know they most likely will just comply. However, just for completeness, can a company like FedEx say that they require a warrant before opening packages?
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Your analogy is completely inapt: 1) A rental car, like a rented house, is still under your control. But your e-mail account on Google's servers is under their control. They can do whatever they want with it. It's more like your friend letting you use part of his garage to store stuff--a third party still retains full control over the space. 2) As far as I can tell, Google can access your e-mail whenever it wants, so…
The interesting thing to me here is that the IRS is not claiming Google/Microsoft, it is claiming all email. Including that which is served by private servers that goes to other recipients on the same private servers. The fact that you own the box that email was delivered to and that email never left that box has no bearing in the matter for the IRS. They still claim the right to inspect it, without a warrant.
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But Google and Facebook are not the only two companies that store users' electronic messages (it's not just email, remember, but also direct messages, stored IM chats, etc.)...
Also don't forget about Carnivore/Echelon and their ilk that presumably have the ability to intercept and store basically all email. Then once your email is duplicated in a government database somewhere, it being primarily housed on a Google or FB server is irrelevant.
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No, that's stupid. That's equivalent to claiming telephone calls aren't private, because they're transmitted in the clear by third party exchanges accessible to authorized users. (email servers generally aren't publicly accessible, rather they're only accessible to authorized (registered) users)
You don't lose your reasonable expectation of privacy by making something publicly available. You lose it by exposing it to a third party (note that e.g. nothing prevents the recipient of your letter from handing it over to the government without a warrant). When you send an e-mail, you make the complete clear text of the e-mail accessible to a third party. The extension of 4th amendment protections to telephone call…
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> 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. Whoa, hold it, I don't think so. Almost every SMTP server out there today requires authentication and quite a few require either SSL or TLS. That is the very defi…
Authentication is to prevent someone from pretending to be you. This is not the same as trying to keep your messages private.
Note how your statement does not hold in the real world.
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Authentication is to prevent someone from pretending to be you. This is not the same as trying to keep your messages private.
The lock on my door is to prevent someone from pretending to be me to enter my property. This is not the same as trying to keep my stuff private or safe. Note how your statement does not hold in the real world.
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Google's email isn't encrypted, it is sent as text over a network. Authentication doesn't change the fact that your email can be intercepted through the network in which it has been sent or received.
> Google's email isn't encrypted, it is sent as text over a network I just grepped my personal email server log to double check, here's an obfuscated entry from this morning: > localhost postfix/smtpd[14440]: TLS connection established from mail-xxxxxxxx.google.com[xxx.xx.xxx.xxx]: TLS v1 with cipher RC4-SHA (128/128 bits) Doesn't look like clear text to me.
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The interesting thing to me here is that the IRS is not claiming Google/Microsoft, it is claiming all email. Including that which is served by private servers that goes to other recipients on the same private servers. The fact that you own the box that email was delivered to and that email never left that box has no bearing in the matter for the IRS. They still claim the right to inspect it, without a warrant.
You don't own your gmail inbox, you don't own your twitter account, you don't own your facebook account. Google, Twitter, and Facebook own them. You don't even rent them. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc, fully own them and fully control them at all times, retaining the right to do whatever they want with them at any time.