Is Einstein Reading Your Email for the Government?
Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. - Justice Louis Brandeis (1928)
A recent ABA Journal article on privacy law (Feds Can Monitor Personal E-Mail Sent Privately to Gov’t Workers, DOJ) began as follows:
You might think that a private-mail sent to another U.S. citizen's personal account isn't subject to government monitoring. But that assumption could be wrong if the recipient is a federal government employee.
Both recipients and senders have no reasonable expectation of privacy if an e-mail is opened by a federal employee logged into a work computer network, according to an Aug. 14 legal opinion from the U.S. Department of Justice that was released Friday.
The Memorandum (PDF file) begins,
Operation of the EINSTEIN 2.0 intrusion-detection system complies with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the pen register and trap and trace provisions of chapter 206 of title 18, United States Code, provided that certain log-on banners or computer-user agreements are consistently adopted, implemented, and enforced by executive departments and agencies using the system. Operation of the EINSTEIN 2.0 system also does not run afoul of state wiretapping or communications privacy laws.
The Memorandum “briefly summarizes the current views of the Office of Legal Counsel on the legality of the EINSTEIN 2.0 intrusion-detection system.” The arguments presented are basically:
- There is no "search" under the 4th Amendment;
- If there is a "search", then it is reasonable; and
- Federal laws trump any state laws.
The central premise of the Memorandum is this, while computer users generally have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the content of Internet communications (such as an e-mail) while it is in transmission over the Internet, the deployment, testing, and use of EINSTEIN 2.0 technology complies with the Fourth Amendment where each agency participating in the program consistently adopts, implements, and enforces the model log-on banner or model computer-user agreements, or their substantial equivalents.
The government's position (which methinks goes too far) is summarized below.
No Search Under the 4th Amendment
The government argues there is no search for Fourth Amendment purposes because “the adoption, implementation, and enforcement of model log-on banners or model computer-user agreements eliminates federal employees’ reasonable expectation of privacy in their uses of Government-owned information systems…."
[Further]… individuals in the private sector who communicate directly with federal employees of agencies participating in the EINSTEIN 2.0 program through Government-owned information systems do not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the content of those communications provided that model log-on banners or agreements are adopted and implemented by the agency.
… By clicking through the model log-on banner or agreeing to the terms of the model computer-user agreement, a federal employee gives ex ante permission to the Government to intercept, monitor, and search “any communications” and “any data” transiting or stored on a Government-owned information system for any “lawful purpose,” including the purpose of protecting federal computer systems against malicious network activity. Therefore, an individual who communicates with a federal employee who has agreed to permit the Government to intercept, monitor, and search any personal use of the employee’s Government-owned information systems has no Fourth Amendment right against the Government activity of protecting federal computer systems against malicious network activity, as the employee has consented to that activity.
The Memorandum goes on to say this applies even when the email was sent to the employee’s non-governmental or personal account. When the,
sender of an email to an employee’s personal, Web-based email account (such as Gmail or Hotmail) does not know of the recipient’s status as a federal employee or does not anticipate that the employee might read, on a federal Government system, an email sent to a personal email account at work or that the employee has agreed to Government monitoring of his communications on that system. A person communicating with another assumes the risk that the person has agreed to permit the Government to monitor the contents of that communication.
But if it is a "Search," then it's Reasonable anyway
The Memorandum argues, even if EINSTEIN 2.0 operations were to constitute a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, …those operations would be consistent with the Amendment’s “central requirement” that all searches be reasonable [because] the Government has a lawful, work-related purpose for the use of EINSTEIN 2.0’s intrusion-detection system that brings the EINSTEIN 2.0 program within the “special needs” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant and probable cause requirements."
State Privacy Laws vs. The Supremacy Clause
The Memoradum’s final argument is the EINSTEIN 2.0 program does not run afoul of state wiretapping or communication privacy laws due to Supremacy clause.
To the extent that such laws purported to apply to the conduct of federal agencies and agents conducting EINSTEIN 2.0 operations and imposed requirements that exceeded those imposed by the federal statutes discussed above, they would “stand as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress,” and be unenforceable under the Supremacy Clause.
What do you think? Do you buy the argument that if you send an email to a government employee's private gmail or yahoo account, then the government may have the right to read the email?
Preceding the last presidential election, Condoleezza Rice was apologizing to presidential candidates for government intrusions into their private passport records. President Obama, a candidate at the time, called for hearings on the matter. Watergate, Hoover, and McCarthyism should remind us as to what ends government intrusions into personal privacy can have. Deeper historic reflections illuminate this point even more. Benjamin Franklin, offered, "they who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security." Of a more local flavor, Boston's Samuel Adams, stated:
Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.
