IRS claims no warrant necessary to read your email

According to new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act, the IRS believes it has the right to read your emails, tweets and text messages - all without a warrant of any kind.

According to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) for any email stored on a server for more than 180 days, along with any email that has been read but not deleted, there is no expectation of privacy. Therefore, a warrant isn't required if authorities demand to read the contents. Any unread email "younger" than 180 days is protected. The same rules apply to text messaging and voice mail as well. The ECPA was passed way back in 1986, when few were using email and the majority probably didn't even know what it was. As such, the law is hopelessly outdated. In 2010, The United States vs. Warshak was brought before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals and the ruling forced the government to comply with the 4th Amendment by showing probable cause and obtaining a warrant before rifling through your ones and zeros.

In 2009, the IRS position was made clear in its "Search Warrant Handbook," which reads: “The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications." This should have been updated after the Warshak ruling, but according to the ACLU, it never was. In 2011, the agency revised many of its training manuals, but the provision stating that no warrant is required for email remains intact. The ACLU sums it up this way:

Let’s hope you never end up on the wrong end of an IRS criminal tax investigation. But if you do, you should be able to trust that the IRS will obey the Fourth Amendment when it seeks the contents of your private emails. Until now, that hasn’t been the case. The IRS should let the American public know whether it obtains warrants across the board when accessing people’s email. And even more important, the IRS should formally amend its policies to require its agents to obtain warrants when seeking the contents of emails, without regard to their age.

None of this is particularly surprising. The government loves its warrantless wiretapping programs. Privacy rights weren't an issue for them with the Patriot Act, and they're not going be bothered with them here. However, the IRS is continuing to grow in scope and power. It has its fingers in virtually every financial transaction that takes place in the United States, and it's about to become the chief enforcer of Obamacare. If the ACLU's suspicions are right, and this kind of abuse is a current, regular, occurrence, it needs to be reined in now, before the agency becomes too big to stop.

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