Jon’s Network

From Wired:

A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision (.pdf) that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.

Most people already have had an expectation of privacy form the beginning with respect to their email, but they haven’t had it thanks to the 1986 federal Stored Communications Act (SCA), which allows the government to obtain e-mail from third parties without getting warrants and without letting targets of an investigation know.

Freaky stuff. That’s why we have judicial review.

So what is the difference between a government reading your private internet communications (an obvious breach of rights) and your employer monitoring your internet and email usage? Well, I have been wondering this for a while now and it comes down to how the courts now interpret the common law concept called respondeat superior. More on that soon. Stay tuned.

Wired article via Techdirt