But Google and Facebook are not the only two companies that store users' electronic messages (it's not just email, remember, but also direct messages, stored IM chats, etc.)...
Also don't forget about Carnivore/Echelon and their ilk that presumably have the ability to intercept and store basically all email. Then once your email is duplicated in a government database somewhere, it being primarily housed on a Google or FB server is irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant. The 4th amendment is enforced primarily by the exclusionary rule. The fact that Carnivore, Echelon, etc, can get to your e-mail anyway doesn't mean that the government can introduce it as evidence in court. To the extent that the 4th amendment doesn't extend to the stuff you store on Google's, Facebook's, etc, servers, the government can introduce that as evidence against you.
Wait, sorry - I don't quite get that, what am I missing here? The logic I'm hearing:
1. Because your emails are "open" (like a postcard) when being transferred over a network, you do not enjoy an "expectation of privacy" for them
2. Therefore if the government "sees it go by" (like a postcard in the mail), they can read it
3. So if the government plants themselves in the middle of a bunch of networks to "see emails go by" and then stores them in a big database, that should be admissible, no?
It seems like the postcard analogy should hold all the way through, right? Ie the government could photograph all mail going through, store it, and look it up later to use in court if they wanted to.
Sure - the IRS may or may not actually look into those databases it in practice due to national security concerns, etc - it's just that they could. [edit: formatting]
But it does mean they could use your email contents to decide to audit you, then in the course of the audit find information which is permissible in court. I'd be shocked if given the revelation in this article, the IRS doesn't browse the email of some people before auditing them.
Carnivore/Echelon will never be introduced as evidence in court. These are tools of war. When they were hunting Bin Laden, they weren't planning on taking him to court in the end and introducing his emails as evidence against him...
That's precisely why ordinary people don't need to worry about what information is collected by Carnivore/Echelon. The results are too valuable to risk disclosure by introducing them into evidence for prosecuting run of the mill crimes. It's highly unlikely that agencies like the IRS even have access to this information for those reasons.
