United States¶
Email¶
update: this needs to be rewritten in light of this case: www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-...
Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers
old content:¶
There is no right to privacy in the United States Constitution. Privacy protections in the US stems from legal precedent over the interpretation of the Fourth Amendment protections “against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
The question of “unreasonable” has historically been resolved by asking if a person has an “expectation of privacy”.
Rehberg v. Paulk, March 11 2010, Eleventh Circuit:
voluntary delivery of emails to third parties constituted a voluntary relinquishment of the right to privacy in that information
In other words, the Eleventh Circuit has ruled that when you use an email provider, you do not expect your email stored on their servers to be private. This reasoning is deeply flawed, but is nonetheless current legal precedent in the US.
In practice, this means the government claims the right to stored email with only a subpoena.
yahoo case¶
www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/email...
There is a 1986 law in the US that allows law enforcement access to emails that are older than 180 days without a warrant. In this case, yahoo was able to fend off the government extending this to a shorter period.
Stored Communication¶
Data Retention¶
Riseup.net is a non-profit incorporated in the US and our servers reside in the US. Because of this, we are subject to US law, but not directly to the law of other localities. The US currently has no data retention laws, so none of these data retention issues apply to riseup.net.
