Privacy. Email. Is US Government reading email without a warrent?

Is US government reading email without a warrant? It doesn't want to talk about it

Jonathan Sanger / msnbc.com

Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the ACLU

By Bob Sullivan

Does the U.S. government read your email? It's a simple question, but apparently there's no simple answer. And the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service are reluctant to say anything on the topic.
In March, the American Civil Liberties Union caused a nationwide stir when the advocacy group released the results of its year-long investigation into law enforcement use of cellphone tracking data. After issuing hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU learned that many local police departments around the country routinely pay mobile phone network operators a small fee to get detailed records of historic cell phone location information. The data tell cops not just where a suspect might have been at a given moment, but also create the possibility of retracing someone's whereabouts for months. In most cases, law enforcement obtains the data without applying for a search warrant; generally, subpoenas are issued instead, which require law enforcement to meet a lower legal standard.


ACLU lawyer Catherine Crump, who ran the cellphone location data investigation, is at it again. This time, she has filed similar Freedom of Information Act requests with several federal agencies, asking about their policies and legal processes for reading Internet users' emails.

"It's high time we know what's going on," Crump told msnbc.com. "It's been clear since the 1870s that the government needs a warrant to read postal mail. There's no good reason email should be treated differently."
There are hints that it is being treated differently, however. In a landmark 2010 case, United States v. Warshak, government investigators acknowledged that they read 27,000 emails without obtaining a search warrant, violating both the suspect's privacy and the privacy of everyone who communicated with the suspect, according to Crump.

Evidence obtained during that email search was thrown out on appeal by the 6^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but that ruling applies only to four U.S. states.

The case opened a window into what Crump fears is a widespread practice.
In the aftermath of the Warshak case, the Internal Revenue Service told its investigators that they should not try to obtain emails without a court order, but in doing so it hinted that other warrantless email searches had been conducted in the past.

For now, hints are all we have. Crump's Freedom of Information Act requests -- filed in February with the FBI, the IRS, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and other agencies -- were largely ignored, she says. So on June 14, she filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York in an attempt to force the agencies to comply.

"Four months have passed and I haven't gotten a single document," she said. "The American people have a right to know."

The federal agencies have until July 19 to reply to the lawsuit. The FBI is not included in the lawsuit because it replied recently denying Crump's request, saying it was too broad. The ACLU is appealing that determination through a different legal procedure.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller directed all questions about the matter to the agency's New York office. A spokeswoman for that office, Ellen Davis, said she couldn't discuss it.

"We do not comment on ongoing litigation," Davis said in an email.
Julianne Breitbeil, a spokeswoman for the IRS, said federal privacy laws prevent the agency from discussing the lawsuit.

The Justice Department and the Obama administration had a chance to settle the issue in April 2011, during a Senate hearing on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Instead, officials with both the Commerce and Justice departments failed to provide any clarity. Instead, a Justice Department official argued against extending Fourth Amendment protections -- specifically strict warrant requirements -- to email, saying that doing so would hinder investigations.

"Congress should consider carefully the adverse impact on criminal as well as national security investigations if a probable-cause warrant were the only means to obtain such stored communications," James Baker, associate deputy attorney general, testified at the hearing.

Crump interpreted the testimony as indicating that warrantless email searches by federal agents are routine.
"It was disappointing when the Obama administration refused to commit one way or the other to obtaining a warrant," she said. "It leads me to suspect the federal government isn't getting warrants."

The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act and its subsection, the Stored Communications Act, provides some guidelines for law enforcement review of email, but those are badly out of date now. They declare that federal authorities don't need a warrant for data that's stored externally (as opposed to locally, on a person's hard drive) if it's more than 6 months old. Given the ubiquity of services like Web-based Gmail, the 180-day distinction and the local vs. network storage issues are both now largely meaningless, and that's essentially what the 6^th Circuit Court found.

The discussion of requirements for email searches is more relevant than ever, given the explosion of social networks and their semi-private conversation tools and the coming of age of cloud services, where corporations are encouraged to keep all data in shared spaces that would fall under the Stored Communications Act. Concerned that such privacy issues would slow adoption of cloud services, a coalition of cloud-friendly companies calling itself "Digital Due Process," has argued for updates to the Electronic Communication Act that would require higher legal standards for digital evidence gathering.

A critical element of the email issue is a debate about whether the Fourth Amendment requires the government to get warrant based on probable cause in order to read a suspect’s email. To get a warrant, the government must appear before a judge, and convincingly argue that inspection a suspect’s email will probably turn up evidence of a crime.

"The warrant and probable cause requirement safeguard Americans' privacy in two important ways. Having to go to a judge means there is someone involved whose job it is to look out for the target's rights. And having to demonstrate probable cause will reduce the chances that innocent people have their communications read," Crump said.

The distinction is also important as the U.S. government plunges headlong into new high-tech surveillance technologies, such as its massive new million-square-foot "Utah Data Center," under construction in rural Utah for the National Security Agency. The facility is designed to help protect cyberspace, NSA official have said. But Wired Magazine published a cover story earlier this year arguing that the facility will be capable of monitoring every email and text message sent around the world -- including messages to and from U.S. citizens. It is scheduled to come online in 2013.

The NSA denies that the facility will be used to spy on Americans, but it's hardly far-fetched to surmise it will have such capabilities.

Explosion of such technological capabilities is why clarifying digital Fourth Amendment rights is so critical, Crump said.

"No data is more personal than email correspondence," she said. "Email is deeply personal and private. It is an unfiltered view of our thoughts and a catalog of our relationships stretching back for years. Government agents should not be allowed to troll through all of our most private correspondence without proving to a judge that they have probable cause to believe that a search will turn up evidence of a crime."

Tuskegee Airmen. 2012 Bridge Dedication. Boston, MA

You are invited to... A Bridge Dedication in Honor of the Tuskegee Airmen Tuesday, July 17, 2012 at 10:30am American Legion Highway and Morton St., Dorchester The bridge is located outside VFW Post 1018 (with Tank out front) The Museum of African American History is proud to announce the special occasion of a bridge dedication in honor of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, a group of heroic African American pilots who fought in World War II. This event is sponsored and organized by the City of Boston. RSVP to Walter Apperwhite at Walter.Apperwhite@cityofboston.gov This is not a Museum of African American History event.

Anxiety. Effective Therapy

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Effective in Combatting Anxiety Disorders, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (June 28, 2012) —

Whether it is a phobia like a fear of flying, public speaking or spiders, or a diagnosis such as obsessive compulsive disorder, new research finds patients suffering from anxiety disorders showed the most improvement when treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in conjunction with a "transdiagnostic" approach -- a model that allows therapists to apply one set of principles across anxiety disorders.  

The combination was more effective than CBT combined with other types of anxiety disorder treatments, like relaxation training according to Peter Norton, associate professor in clinical psychology and director of the Anxiety Disorder Clinic at the University of Houston (UH).

Norton concludes that therapists treating people with anxiety disorders may effectively use a treatment that applies one set of principals across all types of anxiety disorders. The findings are the result of a decade of research, four separate clinical trials and the completion of a five-year grant funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Norton defines anxiety disorders as when anxiety and fear are so overwhelming that it can start to negatively impact a person's day-to-day life. He notes anxiety disorders include: panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety disorder, specific phobias and generalized anxiety disorder. Often anxiety disorders occur with a secondary illness, such as depression, substance or alcohol abuse. Norton says there are targeted treatments for each diagnosis, but there has been little recognition that the treatments don't differ much, and they only differ in very specific ways.

"The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been an important breakthrough in understanding mental health, but people are dissatisfied with its fine level of differentiation," said Norton. "Panic disorders are considered something different from social phobia, which is considered something different from PTSD. The hope was that by getting refined in the diagnosis we could target interventions for each of these diagnoses, but in reality that just hasn't played out."

As a graduate student in Nebraska, Norton couldn't get enough people together on the same night to run a group treatment for social phobia, and that marked the beginning 10 years of work on the transdiagnostic treatment approach.

"What I realized is that I could open a group to people with anxiety disorders in general and develop a treatment program regardless of the artificial distinctions between social phobia and panic disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and focus on the core underlying things that are going wrong," said Norton.

Norton finds cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a type of treatment with a specific time frame and goals, helps patients understand the thoughts and feelings that influence behaviors to be the most effective treatment. The twist for him was using CBT in conjunction with the transdiagnostic approach. The patients receiving the transdiagnostic treatment showed considerable improvement, especially with treating comorbid diagnoses, a disease or condition that co-exists with a primary disease and can stand on its own as a specific disease, like depression.

"What I have learned from my past research is that if you treat your principal diagnosis, such as social phobia and you hate public speaking, you are going to show improvement on some of your secondary diagnosis. Your mood is going to get a little better, your fear of heights might dissipate. So there is some effect there, but what we find is when we approach things with a transdiagnostic approach, we see a much bigger impact on comorbid diagnoses," said Norton. "In my research study, over two-thirds of comorbid diagnoses went away, versus what we typically find when I'm treating a specific diagnosis such as a panic disorder, where only about 40 percent of people will show that sort of remission in their secondary diagnosis. The transdiagnostic treatment approach is more efficient in treating the whole person rather than just treating the diagnosis, then treating the next diagnoses."

Norton notes the larger contributions of the studies are to guide further development and interventions for how clinical psychologists, therapists and social workers treat people with anxiety disorders. The data collected will be useful for people out on the front lines to effectively and efficiently treat people to reduce anxiety disorders.

Norton is the author of the book, "Group Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy of Anxiety. A Transdiagnostic Treatment Manual," and co-author of "The Anti-Anxiety Workbook: Proven Strategies to Overcome Worry, Phobias, Panic and Obsessions." He has authored more than 90 research papers on such topics as anxiety disorders, CBT and chronic pain, and he serves on the editorial boards of two scientific journals.