A question of emails
Jul 13th, 2007 by JamieB
Not long ago a panel of judges from the Sixth U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government violated the constitution when its investigators searched the stored email files of a businessman in a fraud investigation.
The government was investigating Steve Warshak, owner of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, which markets supplements, including a “natural male enhancement” product; but as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted in an editorial, “Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures are there for the offbeat as well as the traditional citizen. It’s unlikely Ernesto Miranda or Larry Flynt are the kind of guys you’d want your daughter to marry, but cases involving each helped secure citizens’ rights.”
The government claimed it didn’t need a warrant to read the old emails, which it had sought from Warshak’s Internet service providers. The court panel rejected that argument. “E-mail is an ever-increasing mode of private communication,” the judges declared, “and protection of shared communications through this medium is as important to Fourth Amendment principles today as protecting telephone conversations has been in the past.”
Emails are also an ever-increasing mode of public communication, and yet many government officials are balking at the notion that, as such, they should fall under the purview of the open records law. This creates a huge loophole in the law, as more and more public business is done on the Internet, Blackberries, etc. . . . and as more and more lawmakers seem to be mixing private and public business on their hand-held devices/
So, here’s the question: How can the government claim that it ought to have access to private emails, without a warrant, while arguing that public emails are off-limits to the public and not covered by our right to know?
How should the the open-records reform currently under debate in the legislature deal with the emails of legislators’ and other public officials?