If you're like most people, you don't give a lot of thought to your stored "Webmail" messages on free email services like Yahoo!, Hotmail, or G-Mail.
Yet, if these services are U.S.-based--and most of them are--the government can obtain a verbatim transcript of your e-mail messages from Webmail services without a warrant and without letting you know that they're reading it. All that's necessary is a court order stipulating that there's reason to believe the e-mail may be relevant to an investigation. Webmail service providers have rarely challenged government surveillance because they don't want to be seen as not enthusiastically supporting the War on Drugs, the War on Child Pornography, the War on Money Laundering, and most recently, the War on Terror.
But on June 19, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that investigators in the states of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee can't read Webmail messages without obtaining a search warrant based on probable cause of criminal activity. The court held that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications.
There are a couple caveats:
1. The ruling applies only in the four states I mentioned. While judges in other states are free to apply the ruling to cases before them, they're not obliged to do so. Outside those four states, it's still open season on your Webmail.
2. The ruling will almost certainly be appealed by the government.
In other words, it's a little early to break out the champagne to celebrate greater privacy rights in your "in box" or "sent" folders.
In the meantime, I highly recommend that you go to any Webmail accounts you have and delete any messages that don't demand an immediate response. Make sure to empty your trash folder, as well. If you want to keep a permanent record, do so on your own PC, not online.
That advice applies no matter where you live, if you're using a U.S.-based Webmail service such as Yahoo! Since the servers are based in the United States, if police in the United States (other than in these four states) want to read your e-mail without a warrant, they can do so. That's true even if your country's law requires a warrant to read them.
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Nestmann
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