Privacy protection for email

There have been a host of privacy debates that have happened in recent times, essentially between the Bush administration and privacy advocates. The need to protect the US from terrorist attack, and including the need to detect such attacks before they happen, seems to have guided the US to break previous privacy protocols, and demand its right to investigate and demand information through snooping, wire-tapping and numerous other sources. The debate is over privacy seekers claiming that these measures are excessive and the Government is seeking excessive authority.
A lot of these measures have turned up in court, with people challenging some decision or the other of the Bush administration; in a recent judgement, the case of email was debated and a decision made, against the administration. The court has ruled that investigators in a Ohio fraud investigation had over-stepped their authority in getting emails from a internet services provider without a warrant, and that citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy of their emails stored in web email service providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail.
Even though this judgement was rendered by the Sixth Circuit federal court, if used by other federal courts, it could set a precedent.

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 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.
At the same time, the ruling could make it more difficult for government investigators to gather information on suspected criminals or terrorists, said Kerr. Investigators would have to gather more incriminating facts about a suspect before they could read personal e-mails.

Fundamentally, email has not been debated in the past like this decision, and whether this decision stays, or is over-turned by the full panel of the 6th circuit, or by the Supreme Court, will decide what laws Congress needs to make in this regard. And it is quite obvious that Congress needs to make more laws in this regard, since the whole question of email, privacy and the need of investigation, especially in the context of preventing terrorist attacks is a wide open question that needs more discussion. If this decision is not over-turned, it will set a benchmark to Congress in terms of what it can provide, and where it needs to draw the line.