The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don\u2019t need a search warrant to review Americans\u2019 e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal.<\/p>\n
Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they\u2019re not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail. The IRS, on the other hand, publicly said last month that it would abandon a controversial policy that claimed it could get warrantless access to e-mail correspondence.<\/p>\n
The U.S. attorney for Manhattan circulated internal instructions, for instance, saying a subpoena \u2014 a piece of paper signed by a prosecutor, not a judge \u2014 is sufficient to obtain nearly \u201call records from an ISP.\u201d And the U.S. attorney in Houston recently obtained the \u201ccontents of stored communications\u201d from an unnamed Internet service provider without securing a warrant signed by a judge first.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really can\u2019t have this patchwork system anymore, where agencies get to decide on an ad hoc basis how privacy-protective they\u2019re going to be,\u201d says Nathan Wessler, an ACLU staff attorney specializing in privacy topics who obtained the documents through open government laws. \u201cCourts and Congress need to step in.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Justice Department\u2019s disinclination to seek warrants for private files stored on the servers of companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft continued even after a federal appeals court in 2010 ruled that warrantless access to e-mail violates the Fourth Amendment.<\/p>\n