The US government has obtained Jacob Appelbaum’s user information and private data from Google without a search warrant. Applebaum works on the Tor project and is a WikiLeaks volunteer. The Obama administration requested the information under a secret order made possible by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) which allows the government to obtain such information without a warrant and without notification of the target.
Julia Angwin, writing for the Wall Street Journal, reports that Santa Rosa, CA-based Sonic.net, Inc. also received the government’s secret order, resisted it, but lost in court and was forced to disclose the information. Angwin reports the secret order included the email addresses of people with whom Applebaum corresponded over the past two years but not the email content.
The ECPA was intended to extend the same protections to electronic communications as those already in place for land-line telephone calls and paper mail, but was enacted before the advent of the web and email services like Google’s Gmail and the widespread use of internet message access protocol (IMAP) where email is stored on a third-party’s server. If ever there were a time to go back to post office protocol (POP) email—where all email is stored on your local computer—this is it.
US law enforcement regularly uses the provisions of the ECPA to obtain email, mobile phone location information, and other digital data without a warrant (which would require showing probable cause that a crime had been committed). Under the provisions of the ECPA, the government need only show “reasonable grounds” that the material sought would be “relevant and material” to an investigation.
Because most of the orders are secret, and the targets usually never know that the government had gained access to their email and mobile phone records (the information providers are generally prohibited from disclosing the information release to targets), it’s difficult to know just how many such information disclosures take place under these secret orders. As an example, Angwin reports that Google, in the last six months of 2009, received 4,601 such requests and complied with 94 percent of them.
There is some movement to revise the ECPA, bringing it up to date with the existing technology. Angwin reports that US Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the ECPA’s original author, has said the law is “significantly outdated and outpaced by rapid changes in technology.” Leahy has introduced revised legislation (.pdf; 66KB).
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