

Eleventh Circuit Decision Largely Eliminates 4th Amendment Protection in E-Mail - skennedy
http://volokh.com/2010/03/15/eleventh-circuit-decision-largely-eliminates-fourth-amendment-protection-in-e-mail/

======
pierrefar
The 11th circuit "has jurisdiction over federal cases originating in the
states of Alabama, Florida and Georgia"( Source:
<http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/about/index.php> ). This is quite a conservative
area of USA so without getting too political, I'm not surprised at this
decision.

------
graphene
Thought-provoking stuff.. While the intent of the fourth amendment is obvious
and noble, I wonder whether, given the accelerating pace of creation and
processing of information, it still makes sense to rely on legislation to
prevent privacy violations. How can there be any hope of enforcing such laws
in the face of the increasing complexity of worldwide communications, where
(as one of the commenters on the article points out) the routing of any given
data is nondeterministic and temporary copies are made at every step? It seems
to me that the law is hopelessly on the wrong side of technological evolution
here (I would make a very similar argument regarding copyright law).

Looking at it from a different angle, perhaps (note a hint of devil's advocate
here) we should be glad that modern cryptographic systems (enabled by the very
tech that seemed to threaten privacy) offer the potential to make old-
fashioned laws superfluous?

~~~
pmccool
I'd say that legislation is more important than ever; privacy can now be
violated in ways that were technically impossible 30 years ago. I agree that
enforcing privacy laws is problematic, but that doesn't mean it's impossible,
nor that it isn't worth trying.

------
macrael
It seems like email encryption should be a pretty solvable problem tech-wise.
Does anyone here actually regularly send and receive such mail? If all the
emails saved on servers were encrypted, we wouldn't have this problem.

~~~
notmyname
Tech-wise, it's a solved problem.

I sign all of my outgoing emails using Thawte (now Verisign) certificates. The
problem with encryption is finding the other person's keys. I have yet to
receive a signed email from someone else, so I cannot send encrypted messages.

It seems to be a problem primarily with critical mass and secondarily from
implementation. Not enough people use signed/encrypted email to spur others to
using it. Additionally, certs cost something. Even free certs cost effort in
understanding the need for them and figuring out how to
generate/download/install them. Then there is the whole problem with "trusted"
certs...

Implementation wise, things are only a little better. Once the certs are
installed, (desktop) mail clients handle the signing/encrypting pretty well.
But I can't sign messages from a webmail client or from my phone.

~~~
ars
Wrong problem. The issue here is not the sending of the message, but the
storage of the message.

You need your ISP to store the emails encrypted even if they were received in
the clear.

