Police Could Be Going Through Your Email, Social Media Information Without Telling You

The government — or rather the police — could search your mail and and access data from social media platforms like Facebook without even telling you, reports Vox.

The Vox article says the government obtains court orders in the hundreds of thousands every year related to this, and some of these orders are search warrants which aim to make online service providers reveal what’s in text messages, emails and text messages.

Then there are also warrantless court orders, which can force companies to reveal metadata associated with your account like locations, dates, times and the names of the sender and recipient of a message.

With search warrants, the government would need to show that they have probable cause that a crime has been done. However, the courts have a very low bar for defining whether a particular metadata is relevant to a criminal investigation that’s underway.

In fact, the courts more or less let law enforcement to figure out what could be relevant in a case.

Similar to traditional search warrants, digital search orders too are issued in secret proceedings. That may be necessary to prevent anyone from letting the suspects know that an investigation is underway. But the problem is that the secrecy is a little too intense with digital warrants.

So much so that it doesn’t even leave the scope for gaining answers to significant constitutional questions.

For instance, if your physical mail is searched by the police, as per the Fourth Amendment, they should notify you of the fact afterwards. However, when the police search your email, they needn’t provide you any notice regarding it. They just need to notify your email provider.

This is rather odd given that in the present world, digital data could be way more revealing than physical mail since apps in your phone could collect and retain information, including photographs, contact lists, email content and more.

The reason why tech companies that receive such demands from government seeking user information would comply without letting you know is the “secrecy order” provision of the Stored Communications Act, which came into being in 1986.

Recently, companies like Facebook and Microsoft challenged the constitutionality of the practice by which the government sought gag orders.

As a response to the lawsuit filed by Microsoft, the Department of Justice made it clear In October that gag orders wouldn’t be issued in every case. There must be “an appropriate factual basis” for doing so.

Also, according to the new decree, the gags shouldn’t last longer than an year unless in exceptional circumstances.

Though such rules are to be welcomed, they are but just “guidance.”

They apply only to federal prosecutors at the Department of Justice and not to local and state police who too frequently seek such data. Neither do these improvements in the law address the baffling distinction present between physical surveillance and electronic surveillance.

Furthermore, information about these orders would be minuscule as the tech companies receiving the gag orders aren't allowed to reveal information yet. And it would be hard for citizens to know if their data was looked into or not currently.

Such ambiguities ought not to exist when it comes to something as inviolable as the law.