janelane wrote:

The company's main product, Enzyte, which promises sexual enhancement, has ads featuring ''Smiling Bob,'' a happy man with an exaggerated smile.

Holy crap! I just saw this ad yesterday! Wait...you mean "natural male enhancement" is just a pseudonym for fraud? Inconceivable!

-janelane

Apparently "natural" means "herbal" which often means "snake oil," but then you gotta figure a placebo is probably all a lot of these guys need. :)

Regardless, this case has raised important Internet civil liberties issues as the government was reading this guy's email for years and was able to do so without a search warrant. I talked about this issue a bit in my 2006 Phreaknic talk on situations where the 4th amendment doesn't apply.

Thus, in the case of e-mail messages stored and sent in the cloud, the government doesn't need a warrant, doesn't need probable cause, and doesn't need to provide the "owner" of the communications with notice. At least, not right away. Indeed, the government can request that the ISP "preserve" future communications that haven't even been conceived of yet, so that the government may demand them if the situation warrants.

The EFF has obtained a ruling (in THIS case) that this practice is not constitutional but that ruling is controversial.

In some respects this is similar to the border search issue. In general, the police are used to the idea that they can search anything at the border. So people start bringing years worth of email correspondence with them across the border and the police think it makes sense for them to be able to search it. Same thing here. The police are used to being able to search any information you've provided to a third party without a warrant. So people start hosting their entire email archive at gmail and the police figure it makes sense for them to be able to search that without a warrant.

The problem is that we're rapidly approaching a place where the 4th amendment won't matter much as a practical concern because our technology has changed in a way that puts most of our personal information beyond its reach. It will be as good as if it didn't exist, and no one is really considering the impact that change is going to have on the nature of our culture. When America finally wakes up and realizes that the Constitution doesn't work the way they thought it did, I think there is going to be hell to pay for the politicians and lawyers who have blissfully allowed this slide down the slippery slope, but in the mean time there are a lot of people like Mr. Warshak who are going to be surprised to learn that everything they are doing has been watched for years without probable cause. Whether or not he deserved it, its still a scary thought.

Decius wrote:

Regardless, this case has raised important Internet civil liberties issues as the government was reading this guy's email for years and was able to do so without a search warrant. I talked about this issue a bit in my 2006 Phreaknic talk on situations where the 4th amendment doesn't apply.

Funny how they left all that 4th amendment stuff out of the news article. Scratch that...it's not funny, it's sad.

BTW, I need some of your business cards so when that scene in Law and Order when the police are questioning me inevitably happens, I can whip them out and say, "If you have any more questions, you'll have to speak to my lawyer." ;-)

-janelane

janelane wrote:

Decius wrote:

Regardless, this case has raised important Internet civil liberties issues as the government was reading this guy's email for years and was able to do so without a search warrant. I talked about this issue a bit in my 2006 Phreaknic talk on situations where the 4th amendment doesn't apply.

Funny how they left all that 4th amendment stuff out of the news article. Scratch that...it's not funny, it's sad.

BTW, I need some of your business cards so when that scene in Law and Order when the police are questioning me inevitably happens, I can whip them out and say, "If you have any more questions, you'll have to speak to my lawyer." ;-)

-janelane

IANAL, but if you said that they'd probably just call in Ice-T in to threaten you anyway.

janelane wrote:

The company's main product, Enzyte, which promises sexual enhancement, has ads featuring ''Smiling Bob,'' a happy man with an exaggerated smile.

Holy crap! I just saw this ad yesterday! Wait...you mean "natural male enhancement" is just a pseudonym for fraud? Inconceivable!

-janelane

Turns out the EFF's page wasn't up to date. The 6th circuit did overturn the ruling that the searches were unconstitutional.

On the other hand, the 9th circuit recently ruled that the 4th amendment applies to text messages, but its not clear exactly how this ruling impacts the provisions at issue in the enzyte case of the stored communications act that allow warrantless collection of emails from "remote computing services."