Obama administration seeks warrantless access to email headers.

[Steven Bellovin]

On Jul 30, 2010, at 3:58 08PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:38:44 +0200 Stefan Kelm <skelm at bfk.de> wrote:
>> Perry,
>> 
>>>  The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic
>>>  communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that
>>> the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval.
>>> Government
>> 
>> Would that really make that much of a difference? In Germany,
>> at least, the so-called "judge's approval" often isn't worth
>> a penny, esp. wrt. phone surveillance. It simply is way too
>> easy to get such an approval, even afterwards.
> 
> It is significantly harder here in the US.

Actually, no, it isn't.  Transaction record access is not afforded the same protection as content.  I'll skip the detailed legal citations; the standard now for transactional records is 'if the governmental entity offers specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."  This is much less than the "probably cause" and specificity standards for full-content wiretaps, which do enjoy very strong protection.

> Equally importantly, it is
> much simpler to determine what warrants were issued after the fact.
> 

Not in this case.  Since the target of such an order is not necessarily the suspect, the fact of the information transfer may never be introduced in open court.  Nor is there a disclosure requirement here, the way there is for full-content wiretaps.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb





---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com