Court: E-mail and web site addresses not private

By Julia Cheever

July 6, 2007

A federal appeals court in San Francisco today upheld the right of government agents to gather information without a search warrant on the e-mail and Internet addresses used by a criminal suspect.

The 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals said that "e-mail and Internet users have no expectation of privacy" in e-mail and Web site addresses.

The court said users should know that these messages are sent and Web sites are visited through third parties such as their Internet service provider and that the information is therefore not private.

The ruling was made in the case of two Southern California men who appealed their conviction and 30-year sentences for operating a large Ecstasy-manufacturing drug laboratory in Escondido.

The appeals court rejected the men's challenge to government agents' surveillance of e mail and Web site addresses on their computers.

The court said that surveillance of computer addresses alone - as opposed to eavesdropping on the content of messages - was similar to collecting information on telephone numbers called or on addresses written on the outside of postal envelopes.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld surveillance of both postal mail addresses and telephone number registers. It first upheld mail address surveillance in 1877 and affirmed inspections of telephone numbers in 1979.

Circuit Judge Raymond Fisher wrote, "The government's surveillance of e-mail addresses also may be technologically sophisticated, but it is conceptually indistinguishable from government surveillance of physical mail."

The court emphasized that it was not ruling on whether government agents were entitled to look at the content of e-mail messages without a warrant.

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