ACLU accuses the IRS of reading Americans’ private email without a search warrant

[Erica Absetz <erica () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/irs-accused-email-snooping-article-1.1313329

he tax man may have his hand in more than just your pocket.

The IRS routinely searches Americans’ emails, sometimes in violation
of the Fourth Amendment, the American Civil Liberties Union claims.

The ACLU released a trove of documents on its website Wednesday that
it obtained from the nation’s tax collection agency through a Freedom
of Information Act request. The group says they “reveal that the IRS
Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can
read your emails without a warrant.”

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Documents reveal that the IRS previously held the position that email
users had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

At issue is whether the IRS is violating the Fourth Amendment to the
Constitution when it has not obtained a warrant before searching the
email accounts of American citizens.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case of United States
v. Warshak that the government needed to obtain a warrant for
information on specific accounts, including private messages.

Nathan Freed Wessler, attorney for the ACLU's Speech, Privacy &
Technology Project, said on thegroup’s website that although the 247
pages it obtained do not clarify whether the IRS has obtained warrants
to search email accounts since Warshak, “they suggest otherwise.”

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The ACLU has called for electronic privacy reform. It says the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act is outdated because it gives the
government the right to look at emails more than than 180 days old
without a search warrant.

"The documents the ACLU obtained make clear that, before Warshak, it
was the policy of the IRS to read people’s email without getting a
warrant," Wessler wrote. "Not only that, but the IRS believed that the
Fourth Amendment" — which protects citizens against unreasonable
searches and seizures —"did not apply to email at all."

The ACLU argues that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which
gives the government the right to look at emails more than 180 days
old without a search warrant, is badly outdated.

While the IRS has refused to say whether it obtains a search warrant
every time it wants to poke into a private citizens’ email, the agency
has justified not doing so in the past.

“The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in
electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because
internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such
communication,” the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief
Counsel wrote in 2009.
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