Court Grants E-Mail Users New Privacy Protections

June 20, 2007 — -- A federal court decision this week could give e-mail users broad new privacy protections against the government but may hamper criminal investigations, legal experts told ABC News.

Monday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio held that Internet users had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of personal e-mails being stored by Internet service providers such as Yahoo! and Google.

It was the first federal appellate court decision to recognize a wide constitutional right to privacy in personal e-mails. Though the ruling only applies in the Sixth Circuit, if followed by other federal courts, the case could shift the debate in the unsettled area of Internet privacy law, lawyers said.

The case is "a blockbuster decision," said Orin Kerr, a former trial lawyer with the Department of Justice's computer crimes division who now teaches at George Washington University School of Law. "It's a ringing endorsement of strong privacy protection in e-mail."

The three-person panel of the Sixth Circuit upheld a lower court order that found federal investigators in an Ohio fraud investigation had overstepped their constitutional power by obtaining e-mails from an Internet service provider without a warrant.

"It goes without saying that like the telephone earlier in our history, e-mail is an ever-increasing mode of private communication, and protecting shared communications through this medium is as important to Fourth Amendment principles today as protecting telephone conversations has been in past," the court said.

Federal wiretapping laws restrict the government's ability to read e-mails as they are being sent. But, the 1986 federal Stored Communications Act allowed investigators to obtain e-mails that have been stored for more than 180 days by a service provider if the e-mails are relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation — a standard, criminal lawyers said, that makes it easy for the government to read personal e-mails.