Warrants on emails...good and bad

Although I agree access to another person's emails must require a warrant I do have a bit of an issue with this...

Warrant Needed to Get Your E-Mail, Appeals Court Says

The government must obtain a court warrant to require internet service providers to turn over stored e-mail to the authorities, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

...“The government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber’s e-mails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause”, the appeals court ruled. The decision — one stop short of the Supreme Court — covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.

Kevin Bankston, a privacy attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, applauded the decision.

“I expect e-mail providers across the country will comply with this,” he said in a telephone interview.

The legal brouhaha centered on Steven Warshak, founder of an Ohio herbal-supplement company that marketed male-enhancement tablets. As part of a fraud investigation, the government obtained thousands of his e-mails from his ISP without a warrant.

He appealed his 25-year conviction on those and other grounds, and the circuit court tossed his sentence on issues unrelated to the court’s language concerning e-mail privacy.

At issue in Warshak’s e-mail flap was a 1986 law that allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an internet service provider or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The appeals court said Tuesday that this part of the Stored Communications Act is unconstitutional.

But the question I have comes from this comment:

“The Fourth Amendment must keep pace with the inexorable march of technological progress, or its guarantees will wither and perish,” the court ruled.

The Constitution says nothing about emails and although I agree a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in electronic communications it's not up to a judge to adjust the Forth Amendment. And where the Constitution is silent we should defer to the elected branches. The problem is ....

The leftists who control the Congress are open about wanting to regulate the web...and they are allowing an unelected bureaucracy overseen by the Presidency to issue regulations that will do the same thing...

As much as I am a bit uneasy with the way he came up with the ruling I am glad he did tell the government they need a warrant.  I pray another judge will slap the FCC with an injunction when they issue net neutrality regulations in the near future.