US authorities retain the right to read "abandoned" e-mail without a court order
The US federal authorities have retained access to the mailboxes of Americans without the need to submit a court order. When considering changes to the law, the US Senate at the last moment refused the amendment , which dealt with the need to present a search warrant for access to the "abandoned" correspondence (abandoned property).
Currently, federal agencies can request the content of unopened e-mail messages if they are stored in a user’s box on a public service for 180 days or more, in accordance with the Stored Communications Act . In this case, the letters are recognized as “abandoned”, and for access to them, the authorities only need to present “proper justification” that the information may be useful for investigation. If the content is stored for less than 180 days, then a court order is required.
A month ago, the Senate Law Committee approved an amendment to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act , which established access to user information on cloud services (including e-mail) only upon presentation of a warrant. The Senate was supposed to approve this amendment together with the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act , but the senators decided to abandon it for unknown reasons.
In general, there is such a legal interpretation that all cloud services are “third parties”, transferring to them their information for storage, users allegedly deliberately refuse privacy. However, in the case of e-mail there is an analogy with a regular mailbox, access to which is considered a violation of the secrecy of postal correspondence. At one time, including thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , it was possible to achieve just such an interpretation, so that access to the contents of letters without a court order is a violation of the US Constitution. However, this may not apply to other content of cloud hosting, including information from the server logs about access to it from a specific account.
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According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google stores Gmail users' IP addresses in logs for 18 months, after which it leaves logs for unlimited storage showing three out of four octets of the IP address, which may be sufficient for identification in some cases.
Currently, federal agencies can request the content of unopened e-mail messages if they are stored in a user’s box on a public service for 180 days or more, in accordance with the Stored Communications Act . In this case, the letters are recognized as “abandoned”, and for access to them, the authorities only need to present “proper justification” that the information may be useful for investigation. If the content is stored for less than 180 days, then a court order is required.
A month ago, the Senate Law Committee approved an amendment to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act , which established access to user information on cloud services (including e-mail) only upon presentation of a warrant. The Senate was supposed to approve this amendment together with the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act , but the senators decided to abandon it for unknown reasons.
In general, there is such a legal interpretation that all cloud services are “third parties”, transferring to them their information for storage, users allegedly deliberately refuse privacy. However, in the case of e-mail there is an analogy with a regular mailbox, access to which is considered a violation of the secrecy of postal correspondence. At one time, including thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , it was possible to achieve just such an interpretation, so that access to the contents of letters without a court order is a violation of the US Constitution. However, this may not apply to other content of cloud hosting, including information from the server logs about access to it from a specific account.
')
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google stores Gmail users' IP addresses in logs for 18 months, after which it leaves logs for unlimited storage showing three out of four octets of the IP address, which may be sufficient for identification in some cases.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/164109/
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