Source: https://www.scribd.com/document/29919111/Amicus-Brief-in-Yahoo-Colorado-Case
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Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 2703', '§ 2703', '§ 2703', '§ 2511', '§ 2703', '§ 2703', '§ 2703', '§ 2703', '§ 2703', '§\n2703', '§ 2703']

Amicus Brief in Yahoo Colorado Case | Search And Seizure | Expectation Of Privacy
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IN RE APPLICATION OF THE Misc. No. 09-Y-080 CBS
FOR AN ORDER PURSUANT TO
18 U.S.C. § 2703(d)
FOUNDATION, THE CENTER FOR DEMOCRACY &
TECHNOLOGY, THE CENTER FOR FINANCIAL PRIVACY
AND HUMAN RIGHTS, THE COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE
INSTITUTE, THE COMPUTER & COMMUNICATIONS
INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION, THE DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING
INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION, GOOGLE INC., NETCOALITION,
THE PROGRESS & FREEDOM FOUNDATION AND TRUSTE
OPPOSING THE UNITED STATES’ MOTION TO COMPEL
COMPLIANCE WITH THIS COURT’S 2703(d) ORDER
Amici are a collection of non-profit public interest and advocacy
organizations, Internet companies and industry associations seeking to
ensure the preservation of Fourth Amendment and statutory privacy
protections for advancing communications technology.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) is a non-profit, member-
supported civil liberties organization working to protect free speech and
privacy rights in the online world. As part of that mission, EFF has served
as counsel or amicus in key cases addressing electronic privacy statutes and
the Fourth Amendment as applied to the Internet and other new
technologies. With more than 14,000 dues-paying members, EFF represents
the interests of technology users in both court cases and in broader policy
debates surrounding the application of law in the digital age, and publishes a
comprehensive archive of digital civil liberties information at one of the
most linked-to web sites in the world, http://www.eff.org.
The Center for Democracy & Technology (“CDT”) is a non-profit
public interest organization focused on privacy and other civil liberties
issues affecting the Internet and other communications networks. CDT
represents the public’s interest in an open, decentralized Internet and
promotes the constitutional and democratic values of free expression,
privacy, and individual liberty.
The Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights (“CFPHR”),
http://www.financial privacy.org, was founded in 2005 to defend privacy,
civil liberties and market economics. The Center is a non-profit human
rights and civil liberties organization whose core mission recognizes
traditional economic rights as a necessary foundation for a broad
understanding of human rights. CFPHR is part of the Liberty and Privacy
Network, a non-governmental advocacy and research 501(c)(3) organization.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a public interest group
dedicated to free enterprise and limited government. We believe that the best
solutions come from people making their own choices in a free marketplace,
rather than government intervention. Since our founding in 1984, CEI has
become a leading national voice on a broad range of regulatory issues, from
environmental policy to technology law to risk regulation.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association (“CCIA”) is a
nonprofit membership organization comprised of a wide range of computer,
Internet, information technology, and telecommunications companies. Our
members include computer and communications companies, equipment
manufacturers, software developers, service providers, re-sellers, integrators,
and financial service companies. Together, our members employ almost one
million workers and generate nearly $250 billion in annual revenue. For
over thirty years, CCIA has advocated for open markets, open systems, open
networks, and full, fair, and open competition. A complete list of CCIA’s
current members is available online at http://www.ccianet.org/members.
The Distributed Computing Industry Association (“DCIA”) is a non-
profit global trade organization working to commercially advance peer-to-
peer (P2P), cloud computing, and related technologies. As part of that
mission, it operates voluntary working groups comprised of industry
representatives engaging with relevant government agencies to improve the
performance of distributed computing software from the perspective of
consumer safety and security. With more than 100 Member companies, the
DCIA brings together software developers and distributors, content
providers, broadband network operators, and service-and-support
companies. In addition to its working groups, the DCIA conducts several
industry trade conferences each year, distributes the weekly online
newsletter DCINFO, and maintains a database of thousands of articles
chronicling industry development at http://www.dcia.info.
Google Inc. (“Google”), is a technology leader focused on improving
the ways people connect with information. Google offers a broad range of
communication and collaboration tools for its users including Gmail, a web-
based email service that permits users to store their email online and to
download it to their own computer. As an electronic communications
service to the public, Google receives legal process from various state and
federal agencies, seeking customer information, including the content of
Gmail. As such, Google is directly affected by requests such as the one at
issue in this matter.
NetCoalition serves as the public policy voice for some of the world’s
most innovative Internet companies on the key legislative, administrative,
and legal issues affecting the online world. Its members include
Amazon.com, Ask, Bloomberg LP, eBay, IAC, Google, Wikipedia, and
The Progress & Freedom Foundation (“PFF”) is a market-oriented
think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public
policy. Its mission is to educate policymakers, opinion leaders and the
public about issues associated with technological change, based on a
philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty.
TRUSTe Privacy Seals help consumers click with confidence by
guiding them to trustworthy Web sites. Thousands of Web sites rely on
TRUSTe industry best practices to help them make the right decisions about
privacy and protecting confidential user information. Forty percent of the
top one hundred Web sites are certified to TRUSTe’s leading practices
including leading retailers, Apple, eBay, Cabela’s, Best Buy, Audible,
LeapFrog, Microsoft and Yahoo!. To find out more about TRUSTe, visit
http://www.truste.com.
The government seeks to compel Yahoo! to turn over the contents of
one of its user’s email accounts without a search warrant and based on a
showing only that the information is relevant and material to the
government’s investigation. Because the emails have been opened, the
government asserts they are no longer electronic communications in
“electronic storage” and receive less privacy protection than do unread
emails. The user apparently has not been notified of this request, but Yahoo!
has opposed it because the disclosure would be contrary to the weight of
precedent and would improperly violate its customer’s constitutional rights.
Yahoo! is correct that 18 U.S.C. § 2703 of the Stored
Communications Act (“SCA”) requires the government to get a search
warrant to obtain access to a Yahoo! user’s emails that are no more than 180
days old, even if the user may have opened those messages. This is the only
conclusion consistent with the plain language of the statute, relevant case
law, and the legislative history. Moreover, the Fourth Amendment protects
stored emails just as it does conversational privacy and private papers. The
mere fact that a service provider has the ability to access email messages
does not defeat the user’s expectation of privacy in their contents, just as the
fact that telephone wires lead outside the home does not extinguish the
Fourth Amendment rights of those talking over the telephone lines, and just
as the fact that one has a roommate or is renting a room does not defeat
Fourth Amendment protection in one’s home or hotel room.
This Court must protect the user’s privacy in these emails by requiring
the government to seek and obtain a search warrant based on probable cause,
either by interpreting the SCA correctly and finding that opened messages
are “in electronic storage” or by finding that users have a constitutionally
protected reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored communications.
I. THE STORED COMMUNICATIONS ACT REQUIRES THE
GOVERNMENT TO OBTAIN A SEARCH WARRANT FOR
THE EMAILS IT SEEKS.
Section 2703 of the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) plainly
requires the government to obtain a search warrant in order to compel
Yahoo!’s disclosure of emails no more than 180 days old, which are in
“electronic storage” and therefore strongly protected by the statute
regardless of whether they are opened or unopened. See 18 U.S.C. § 2703(a)
(requiring a warrant before the government may obtain communications
contents in “electronic storage” with an electronic communication service
provider for 180 days or less); Theofel v. Farey-Jones, 341 F.3d 978, 985
(9th Cir. 2003) (finding that opened emails stored by a provider for backup
purposes of the provider or the user are in “electronic storage”). The
government’s strained reading of the SCA to allow access to these messages
without a warrant contradicts the statute’s plain language, the existing case
law, and the SCA’s privacy-protective purpose, and should by rejected by
this Court. See Yahoo! Br. at Section I.1
II. THE FOURTH AMENDMENT REQUIRES THE
GOVERNMENT TO OBTAIN A SEARCH WARRANT TO
COMPEL PRODUCTION OF THE EMAILS IT SEEKS.
A. USERS OF AN EMAIL SERVICE HAVE A
REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN
THEIR STORED EMAIL.
1. Under Supreme Court Precedent Applying the
Fourth Amendment to Telephone Conversations,
Email Users Possess a Reasonable Expectation of
Privacy in the Contents of Emails Stored with an
Under the reasoning of Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967),
which is the touchstone of modern Fourth Amendment doctrine, email users
have a constitutionally protected “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their
stored email messages. See id. at 360-61 (Harlan, J., concurring). Fourth
In addition, the doctrine of constitutional avoidance leads to this
construction, as it is the only reading of the statute that would allow the
Court to avoid the serious constitutional question surrounding the Fourth
Amendment’s application to email. That doctrine “rest[s] on the reasonable
presumption that Congress did not intend” any meaning of a statute “which
raises serious constitutional doubts,” Clark v. Martinez, 543 U.S. 371, 381
(2005), and “[i]t is therefore incumbent upon [the Court] to read the statute
to eliminate those doubts so long as such a reading is not plainly contrary to
the intent of Congress.” United States v. X-Citement Videos, Inc., 513 U.S.
64, 78 (1994); see also United States ex rel. Attorney General v. Delaware
& Hudson Co., 213 U.S. 366, 407-08 (1909).
Amendment protections apply where “a person [has] exhibited an actual
(subjective) expectation of privacy . . . that society is prepared to recognize
as [objectively] ‘reasonable.’” Id. The reasonableness of an expectation of
privacy in the contents of stored emails is directly analogous to society’s
constitutionally-protected expectations of privacy in the contents of phone
The Supreme Court in Katz held that “the Fourth Amendment protects
people, not places.” Id. at 351 (majority opinion). Even though Mr. Katz’s
telephone conversations were intangible and not “houses, papers, [or]
effects,” and even though they were transmitted via the telephone company’s
property, they were protected by the Fourth Amendment against search or
seizure by the government. Compare id. with Olmstead v. United States,
277 U.S. 438, 464-65 (1928) (government’s wiretapping of telephone lines
outside of bootlegging suspect’s home and offices was not a search or
seizure because there was no entry into the suspect’s properties). In Katz,
the Supreme Court recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects society’s
shared expectations about what is private, and applied Fourth Amendment
protections based on the telephone’s vital societal role as a medium for
private communication. Id. at 352 (“To read the Constitution more narrowly
is to ignore the vital role that the public telephone has come to play in
private communication.”). In 1967, society’s reliance on public telephones
for private communication established both the subjective expectation that
phone calls were private as well as the objective reasonableness of that
expectation, giving rise to Fourth Amendment protection. See id.
Since Katz, the Supreme Court has looked regularly to societal
expectations when applying the Fourth Amendment, particularly when
scrutinizing new technologies. See Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. 103, 111
(2006) (finding search based on spouse’s consent over target’s objection
unreasonable based on “widely shared social expectations” and “commonly
held understanding[s]”); Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34 (2001)
(recognizing that technological advances must not be allowed to erode
society’s expectation in “that degree of privacy against government that
existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted”).
Based on society’s extensive use of email for private, sensitive
communications, it is plain that email plays at least as vital a role in private
communication today that the public telephone played in 1967, and that
society expects and relies on the privacy of email messages just as it relies
on the privacy of the telephone system.2 It is equally plain that society
expects privacy in its stored email messages: email users often store many if
not all of their personal messages with the provider after they have been sent
As of 2003, more than 100 million Americans used email, and “more than
nine in ten online Americans have sent or read email.” Pew Research
Center, America’s Online Pursuits, available at
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2003/Americas-Online-Pursuits.aspx
(last visited Apr. 11, 2010). By 2008, the majority of Internet users (56%)
were using webmail, where the messages are stored with the service
provider. Pew Research Center, Use of Cloud Computing Applications and
Services, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Use-of-Cloud-
Computing-Applications-and-Services.aspx (last visited Apr. 11, 2010).
or received, rather than downloading them onto their own computers. See
United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc., 579 F.3d 989, 1005 (9th
Cir. 2009) (en banc) (Noting that “many people no longer keep their email
primarily on their personal computer, and instead use a web-based email
provider, which stores their messages along with billions of messages from
and to millions of other people.”). Indeed, the largest email services are
popular precisely because they offer users huge amounts of computer disk
space in the Internet “cloud” within which users can warehouse their emails
for perpetual storage.3 In light of these societal patterns, to hold that the
hundreds of millions of people who store their email messages with
providers such as Yahoo! or Microsoft or Google lack either a subjective or
objective expectation of privacy makes no sense, and would plainly violate
Katz by failing to protect society’s expectations of privacy.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735
(1979), reaffirmed and clarified Katz’s holding that the Fourth Amendment
protects the contents of private communications such as email. The Smith
court distinguished the contents of phone calls, which it reaffirmed are
For example, Google’s “Gmail” service currently offers over more than
seven gigabytes of free storage space. Google, Google Storage, available at
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39567 (last
visited Apr. 11, 2010); see also Google, Getting Started with Gmail,
available at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/start.html (last visited
Apr. 11, 2010) (“Don’t waste time deleting messages . . . . [T]he typical
user can go for years without deleting a single message.”) (emphasis in
protected by the Fourth Amendment under Katz, from the dialed phone
numbers acquired by “pen register” surveillance, which it held are not
protected. Id. at 741-42.4 Smith concluded that dialed phone numbers are
not protected by the Fourth Amendment because “a person has no legitimate
parties,” as that person has “assumed the risk” that the information
“revealed” to the third party will be conveyed to the government. Id. at 743-
744, citing, inter alia, United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435, 442-44 (1976)
(holding that bank customer had no reasonable expectation of privacy in
checks, financial statements, and deposit slips held by bank). Despite the
fact that the electrical impulses constituting the contents of a telephone
conversation are just as exposed to telephone company equipment as dialed
numbers, Smith made clear that its holding did not disturb Katz’s reasoning
because “pen registers do not acquire the contents of communications.” Id.
at 741 (emphasis in original). Accord United States v. Thompson, 936 F.2d
1249, 1252 (11th Cir. 1991) (noting that “a device which merely records the
numbers dialed from a particular telephone line” does not violate the Fourth
Amendment (emphasis added)). In other words, Smith held that Miller’s
“assumption-of-risk” analysis does not extend to communications content
protected under Katz, and confirmed that spying on what callers are saying is
Amici do not necessarily agree that Smith was correct in holding that dialed
phone numbers are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, but instead cite
it only for the holding that the contents of communications are so protected.
more invasive than knowing what phone numbers they are dialing. See
Smith, 442 U.S. at 741 (quoting United States v. New York Tel. Co., 434
U.S. 159, 167 (1977) (pen registers “disclose only the telephone numbers
that have been dialed . . . [not] the purport of any communication between
the caller and the recipient” (emphasis added))).
The content of stored email—like the phone call content protected
under Katz and Smith—is in no way analogous to the business records at
issue in Miller, but rather constitutes one’s private papers and effects. As
the Miller court explained in distinguishing Katz, “the documents
subpoenaed [were] not respondent’s ‘private papers’” nor his “confidential
communications,” and the “respondent [could] assert neither ownership nor
possession [of the documents]. Instead, these [were] the business records of
the banks,” which “pertain[ed] to transactions to which the bank was itself a
party” and “contain[ed] only information . . . exposed to [the bank’s]
employees in the ordinary course of business.” Miller, 425 U.S. at 440-42
In contrast, the eavesdropping in Katz constituted a search and seizure
of Katz’s intangible conversations, which were constitutionally akin to his
tangible papers and effects. See Katz, 389 U.S. at 353 (finding that “[t]he
Government’s activities in electronically listening to and recording the
petitioner’s words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied”
(emphasis added)). The Supreme Court has reaffirmed many times that
under the Constitution, conversations are like papers and effects, not mere
business records. See Berger v. New York, 388 U.S. 41, 63 (“conversation”
protected by the Fourth Amendment and akin to “the innermost secrets of
one’s home or office”); Smith, 442 U.S. at 741-42, quoting New York Tel.
Co., 434 U.S. at 167 (1977) (finding no search or seizure because the
surveillance devices at issue did not disclose “the purport of any
communication between the caller and the recipient” (emphasis added));
United States v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297, 313 (1972) (“the broad
and unsuspected governmental incursions into conversational privacy which
electronic surveillance entails necessitate the application of Fourth
Amendment safeguards.”). These cases confirm that the Fourth Amendment
protects the content of private conversations, whether tangible or intangible
and regardless of whether transmitted over the telephone system or the
Finally, the conclusion that the Fourth Amendment protects stored
email is also supported by analogy to the expectation of privacy in the
contents of sealed postal mail and in the contents of hotel rooms and other
rented properties. The Supreme Court has recognized an expectation of
privacy in the contents of sealed packages and letters even though carried by
a third party. See Ex Parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727, 733 (1878). Bank
customers expect privacy in the contents of their safe deposit boxes, even
though stored by a third party. See United States v. Thomas, No. 88-6341,
1989 WL 72926, at *2 (6th Cir. July 5, 1989). Finally, tenants in rented
residences and hotel rooms maintain Fourth Amendment privacy in their
units while they occupy them. See Stoner v. California, 376 U.S. 483, 489
(1964). The fact that the property owners and their employees may be
entitled to enter the premises to repair damage or provide agreed-upon
services, analogous to the “spam” and computer virus filtering often
provided by email services such as Yahoo!, does nothing to diminish the
tenant’s expectations against the government. Id.
2. Following Supreme Court Precedent, Judges and
Scholars Have Regularly Concluded That Email
Users Possess A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in
the Contents of Emails Stored With An Email
Looking to the clear lesson of Katz and Smith, a long line of judges
and legal scholars have concluded that the Fourth Amendment protects
stored email messages. Two federal, military appellate courts have come to
this conclusion, affording Fourth Amendment protection to email messages,
despite the role of third-party email providers in storing these messages.
See, e.g., United States v. Maxwell, 45 M.J. 406, 418-19 (C.A.A.F. 1996);
United States v. Long, 64 M.J. 57, 65 (C.A.A.F. 2006). Many Article III
courts have agreed. A judge in the District of Rhode Island has held that
users possess Fourth Amendment rights in email accounts operated by
private providers. Wilson v. Moreau, 440 F. Supp. 2d 81, 108 (D.R.I. 2006)
(finding “a reasonable expectation of privacy in [a user’s] personal Yahoo e-
mail account”). Another judge in the Eastern District of New York has ruled
that the numbers dialed on a telephone after a call has been initiated—
numbers like account numbers sent to a bank or the password and
commands sent to a voice mail system—are protected contents under Katz,
and distinguishable from unprotected numbers dialed to initiate a call under
Smith. In re Applications of U.S. for Orders Authorizing the Use of Pen
Registers and Trap and Trace Devices, 515 F. Supp. 2d 325, 336 (E.D.N.Y.
2007). Similarly, a judge the District of Massachusetts found Fourth
Amendment protection in the contents of a password-protected website.
United States v. D’Andrea, 497 F. Supp. 2d 117 (D. Mass. 2007).
Importantly, none of these judges applied the assumption of risk
rationale of Miller to email. As one put it,
The “assumption of risk” . . . is far from absolute. “Otherwise
phone conversations would never be protected, merely because
the telephone company can access them; letters would never be
protected, by virtue of the Postal Service’s ability to access
them; the contents of shared safe deposit boxes or storage
lockers would never be protected, by virtue of the bank or
storage company’s ability to access them.” These
consequences of an extension of the assumption of risk doctrine
are not acceptable under the Fourth Amendment.
In re Applications of U.S., 515 F. Supp. 2d at 338 (citations removed).
Courts of Appeal have concurred. Both the Sixth and Ninth Circuits
have directly extended Fourth Amendment protection to the contents of
electronic communications, albeit in one opinion that was vacated on other
grounds and another that is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.
First, in Warshak v. United States (Warshak I), 490 F.3d 455 (6th Cir. 2007),
the Sixth Circuit noted that “like the telephone earlier in our history, e-mail
is an ever-increasing mode of private communication, and protecting shared
communications through this medium is as important to Fourth Amendment
principles today as protecting telephone conversations has been in the past.”
Id. at 473. It expressly rejected the assumption of risk rationale for email,
finding that “simply because the phone company or the ISP could access the
content of e-mail and phone calls, the privacy expectation in the content of
either is not diminished, because there is a societal expectation that the ISP
or the phone company will not do so as a matter of course.” Id. at 471
(emphasis in original). Second, and in similar terms, the Ninth Circuit found
that users of a text messaging service possessed a Fourth Amendment
reasonable expectation of privacy, because it could find “no meaningful
distinction between text messages and letters.” Quon v. Arch Wireless
Operating Co., 529 F.3d 892, 905 (9th Cir. 2008).
Although both of these opinions have now been vacated—Warshak as
not ripe, Warshak v. United States, 532 F.3d 521, 523 (6th Cir. 2008), Quon
by the Supreme Court upon its grant of certiorari, City of Ontario v. Quon,
130 S. Ct. 1011 (2009)—both cases are nevertheless persuasive precedents.
Warshak provides a detailed and careful explanation why email contents are
constitutionally protected. Quon directly applies the Ninth Circuit’s earlier
reasoning in United States v. Forrester, 495 F.3d 1041 (9th Cir. 2007),
which is still good law. In Forrester, the Ninth Circuit expressly analogized
electronic mail—with its non-private addressing information and its private
contents—to physical mail. Id. at 1049 (“E-mail, like physical mail, has an
outside address “visible” to the third-party carriers that transmit it to its
intended location, and also a package of content that the sender presumes
will be read only by the intended recipient. The privacy interests in these
two forms of communication are identical. The contents may deserve
Fourth Amendment protection, but the address and size of the package do
Even more recently, the Eleventh Circuit recognized the Fourth
Amendment distinction between the contents of communications that are
expected to remain private and non-content information that is voluntarily
exposed to a communications provider. See United States v. Beckett, No.
09-10579, 2010 WL 776049, at *4 (11th Cir. March 9, 2010) (“Beckett
could not have had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information
that was obtained from the ISPs and the phone companies. The investigators
did not recover any information related to content.”) (unpublished per
curiam opinion by Judges Hull, Wilson, and Anderson) (emphasis added).5
Finally, courts have found important expectations of privacy in email
In another opinion published just two days after Beckett, a different panel
of the Eleventh Circuit threatened to upset the consensus that the content of
electronic communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment, by
conflating email content with email records when holding that, “[l]acking a
valid expectation of privacy in that email information, Rehberg fails to state
a Fourth Amendment violation for the subpoenas for his Internet records.”
Rehberg v. Paulk, No. 09-11897, 2010 WL 816832, at *9 (11th Cir. Mar. 11,
2010) (emphasis added). Amicus Electronic Frontier Foundation,
representing the plaintiff, petitioned last month for a rehearing in that case
(petition available at http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/rehberg_v_hodges/
rehbergmotion.pdf, last accessed Apr. 11, 2010).
outside of the Fourth Amendment context. For example, several courts have
extended the attorney-client privilege to email messages, finding both
subjective and objective expectations of privacy and explaining why the
provider’s ability to access the messages did not produce a different result.
See, e.g., Stentgart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc., A-16-09, 2010 N.J. LEXIS
241, *38-39 (N.J. Mar. 30, 2010) (“Under all of the circumstances, we find
that Stentgart could reasonably expect that e-mails she exchanged with her
attorney on her personal, password-protected, web-based e-mail account,
accessed on a company laptop, would remain private.”); Pure Power Boot
Camp v. Warrior Fitness Boot Camp, 587 F. Supp. 2d 548, 565 (S.D.N.Y.
2008) (finding, in the attorney-client privilege context, that a user “had a
reasonable subjective and objective belief that his [Hotmail]
communications would be kept confidential”).
In addition to the growing consensus in the courts, a growing number
of legal scholars have concluded that users have a reasonable expectation of
privacy in the contents of electronic mail messages. See, e.g., Patricia L.
Bellia & Susan Freiwald, Law in a Networked World: Fourth Amendment
Protection for Stored Email, 2008 U. Chi. Legal F. 121, 135-140; Orin S.
Kerr, Applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet: A General Approach,
Stan. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2010) (setting out a presumption that the
contents of communications are normally protected by the Fourth
Amendment); Stephen Henderson, Nothing New Under the Sun? A
L. Rev. 507, 527 (2005) (“Therefore, as with postal mail and telephone
conversations, the sender of e-mail retains no REP [reasonable expectation
of privacy] in the addressing components, but should retain a REP in the
contents.”). Amici know of no legal scholars who have concluded otherwise.
In sum, many of our most important private conversations have
migrated from the telephone network and the sealed envelope to the email
server, and the Supreme Court’s repeated holdings about conversational
privacy should apply directly to this new medium. Katz and Smith require
that this Court afford stored email the same protection as private
conversations, papers and effects.
3. Yahoo!’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
Support Rather than Undermine Users’ Reasonable
Expectation of Privacy in Their Emails.
To the extent the government contends that Yahoo!’s privacy policy
and terms of service eliminate users’ expectation of privacy in their emails,
the Court should decline that invitation “to make a crazy quilt of the Fourth
Amendment” by allowing its protections to be dictated by the “practices of a
private corporation.” See Smith, 442 U.S. at 745. Basic constitutional rights
should not turn on the wording of a particular email provider’s agreements
with its users. However, to the extent the Court does consider those notices,
they clearly support rather than undermine Yahoo! email users’ privacy
Email providers like Yahoo! routinely supplement their users’
expectation of privacy via official “privacy policies” that delineate the
providers’ limited authority to access stored email. For example, Yahoo!’s
Privacy Policy reassures users that:
Yahoo! takes your privacy seriously…. We limit access to
personal information about you to employees who we believe
reasonably need to come into contact with that information to
We have physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that
comply with federal regulations to protect personal information
Yahoo!, Yahoo! Privacy Policy, available at http://privacy.yahoo.com/ (last
visited Apr. 11, 2010) (emphasis in original); see also, e.g., Google, Google
Privacy Policy, available at http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html (last
visited Apr. 11, 2010) (“At Google we recognize that privacy is important
. . . . Google only processes personal information for the purposes described
in this Privacy Policy . . . .”). These representations belie any claim by the
government that providers have “unlimited access” to stored email that
eliminates constitutional protections, and instead only add to the
reasonableness of email users’ expectation of privacy.
Yahoo!’s Terms of Service further bolster an expectation of privacy
by disclaiming any ownership interest in its users’ emails. See Yahoo!,
Yahoo! Terms of Service, available at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ (last
visited Apr. 11, 2010) (“Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you
submit or make available for inclusion on the Yahoo! services.”). Thus, the
emails in this case are entirely unlike the records in Miller, which were “not
respondent’s ‘private papers’” nor his “confidential communications” but
instead were “the business records of the banks,” and the “respondent
[could] assert neither ownership nor possession [of the documents].” Miller,
425 U.S. at 442 (emphasis added).
The mere fact that a privacy policy or term of service may allow for
some level of access to a user’s emails is not enough to undermine the
constitutionally protected expectation of privacy. The fact that others may
have occasional access to a computer does not automatically eliminate
Fourth Amendment protection for others that use that computer. Leventhal
v. Knapek, 266 F.3d 64, 73-74 (2d Cir. 2001) (holding that public employee
had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his office
computer). Nor do policies that allow limited access to private content in
order to maintain the security and integrity of the provider’s systems.
United States v. Heckenkamp, 482 F.3d 1142, 1147 (9th Cir. 2007)
(University policy reserving right to access student computers to protect
rights and property did not undermine reasonable expectation of privacy or
Fourth Amendment protection).
Rather, as Katz, Smith, and New York Tel. Co. make clear, neither a
provider’s limited ability to access communications nor its occasional use of
that ability is relevant to the customer’s expectation of privacy in the
contents of those communications. A “telephone conversation itself must be
electronically transmitted by telephone company equipment, and may be
recorded or overheard by the use of other company equipment.” Smith, 442
U.S. at 746 (Stewart, J., dissenting). “Yet,” despite telephone providers’
potential and actual surveillance of phone calls, the Supreme Court has
“squarely held that the user of even a public telephone is entitled ‘to assume
that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the
world.’” Id. at 746-47, quoting Katz, 389 U.S. at 352. Put simply, the
potential exposure of telephone call content to a phone company’s linesmen
and fraud investigators does not eliminate a caller’s expectation of privacy
Phone service subscribers retain this expectation despite the fact that,
at common law, they have impliedly consented to eavesdropping by the
phone company that is reasonably necessary to effectively maintain the
phone service or prevent its fraudulent use. See, e.g., Bubis v. United States,
384 F.2d 643, 648 (9th Cir. 1967), citing Brandon v. United States, 382 F.2d
607 (10th Cir. 1967). This common law “provider exception” to statutory
wiretapping claims existed when Katz was decided, and was codified in
1968’s federal Wiretap Act and subsequent amendments:
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for . . . a provider of
wire or electronic communication service, whose facilities are
used in the transmission of a wire or electronic communication,
to intercept, disclose, or use that communication in the normal
service . . . .
18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(a)(i). Yet no court has ever indicated that this limited
access and disclosure—or a subscriber’s implied consent to it—negates the
subscriber’s expectation of privacy in the contents of her communications.
Yahoo!’s terms of service describing when it may voluntarily access
or disclose Yahoo! customers’ email track the existing provider exception,
and like that exception focus on Yahoo!’s ability to render service and
protect its rights and property:
You acknowledge, consent and agree that Yahoo! may access,
preserve and disclose your account information and Content if
required to do so by law or in a good faith belief that such
access preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to: (i)
comply with legal process; (ii) enforce the TOS; (iii) respond to
claims that any Content violates the rights of third parties; (iv)
respond to your requests for customer service; or (v) protect the
rights, property or personal safety of Yahoo!, its users and the
Yahoo!, Yahoo! Terms of Service, available at
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ (last visited Apr. 11, 2010). This is
exactly the type of limited access by the provider that was and is irrelevant
under Katz’s and Heckenkamp’s reasoning.
Consequently, neither the potential exposure of stored email to
Yahoo!’s system administrators in the course of their regular duties, nor
Yahoo!’s use of software filters to screen out junk email and emails
containing viruses, eliminates an email user’s expectation of privacy. To
hold otherwise would pose a constitutional Catch-22 that ignores the vital
role that email and the Internet as a whole play in private communication.
Providers attempting to offer absolutely private, constitutionally-protected
communications solutions by swearing off any access to customers’ content
would be unable to adequately maintain the security and reliability of their
services, while Internet users wishing to take advantage of reliable services
free of security-threatening computer viruses and crippling amounts of
unsolicited “spam” messages would be forced to sacrifice their Fourth
Amendment rights. Such a result would, contrary to Kyllo, allow advances
in technology to erode long-standing societal understandings of privacy, see
id., 533 U.S. at 34, and contrary to Katz, force Internet users to accept that
the messages they send may be broadcast to the world, see id., 389 U.S. at
B. THE FOURTH AMENDMENT REQUIRES THE
GOVERNMENT TO OBTAIN A SEARCH WARRANT
BEFORE INVADING AN EMAIL USER’S
The government may not circumvent the warrant requirement and
avoid a probable cause showing by using a § 2703(d) order to compel the
disclosure of email communications that are reasonably expected to be
private. No case law supports the dangerous proposition that a mere
showing of relevance to compel disclosure of stored private emails from an
email provider satisfies the Fourth Amendment. Cases such as United States
v. Miller that allowed subpoenas to compel the production of business
records that were not reasonably expected to be private are inapposite
because Yahoo!’s email users do possess a reasonable expectation of privacy
in their emails, which are their private documents and not the business
records of Yahoo!. See supra at Section II.A. The usual Fourth Amendment
rule requiring a search warrant based on probable cause for unnoticed
searches and seizures of private materials applies.
The government argued in Warshak for a per se rule where compelled
disclosures only ever require reasonableness, as opposed to the probable
cause required for a warrant. Yet, as the law professor amici demonstrated
in their brief in Warshak and in later legal scholarship, courts have upheld
the use of subpoenas to obtain records only after first finding no reasonable
expectation of privacy in the materials sought. See Patricia L. Bellia &
Susan Freiwald, The Fourth Amendment Status of Stored E-Mail: The Law
Professors’ Brief in Warshak v. United States, 41 U.S.F. L. Rev. 559, 579-
85 (2007); Bellia & Freiwald, Law in a Networked World, supra, at 141-47.
For example, the Supreme Court in Miller needed to address whether there
was an expectation of privacy in bank records before holding that the
subpoenas in that case satisfied the Fourth Amendment. See Miller, 425
U.S. at 440-43; see also Warshak I, 490 F.3d at 474 (discussing Miller and
similar cases where courts have upheld the constitutionality of subpoenas
only after finding no reasonable expectation of privacy in the subpoenaed
materials); Bellia & Freiwald, Law in a Networked World, supra, 143-46
(same). Thus, the government’s assertion that it may compel disclosure of
stored emails from an email provider upon a showing that the information is
relevant and material to the investigation, regardless of an email user’s
reasonable expectation of privacy, is mistaken.
Courts’ careful consideration of the reasonable expectation of privacy
question before allowing compelled disclosure via subpoena demonstrates
that a subpoena compelling the disclosure of, e.g., “a personal diary” would
raise “[s]pecial problems of privacy” not raised by a subpoena for a third
party’s financial records. See Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 401 n.7
(1976). Those special problems of privacy are squarely presented here, and
may only be overcome by the same showing of probable cause that is
ordinarily required when the government wants to search and seize personal
documents or communications. As the court in Warshak I held in analogous
The government’s compelled disclosure argument . . . begs the
critical question of whether an e-mail user maintains a
reasonable expectation of privacy in his e-mails . . . . If he does
not . . . then the government must meet only the reasonableness
standard applicable to compelled disclosures to obtain the
material. If, on the other hand, the e-mail user does maintain a
reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of the e-mails
. . . then the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause standard
controls the e-mail seizure.
Warshak I, 490 F.3d at 469 (emphasis added). In other words, where there
is an expectation of privacy in the subpoenaed email, “subpoenaing the
entity with mere custody over the documents is insufficient to trump the
Fourth Amendment warrant requirement.” Id. at 475.
This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that the email user in this case
apparently has not been notified of the Court’s § 2703(d) order and thus has
not had any opportunity to respond to it. From the perspective of the email
service user, which the Court must bear in mind is the relevant perspective
here, see Stoner, 376 U.S. at 489 (propriety of search depends on rights of
hotel guest, not proprietor), the government’s acquisition of stored email
without notice or an opportunity to be heard is indistinguishable from a
search or seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Absent notice and
opportunity to be heard, however, the compelled disclosure of materials in
which the target has a reasonable expectation of privacy are simply searches
and seizures by another name. See People v. Lamb, 732 P.2d 1216, 1220
(Colo. 1987) (requiring prior notice where subpoena is used to obtain third-
party records in which target has reasonable expectation of privacy, in order
to avoid unreasonable search or seizure: “the availability of a hearing
subsequent to production and disclosure . . . is inadequate because once the
privacy interest has been violated there is no effective way to restore it.”);
see also King v. State, 535 S.E.2d 492, 497 (Ga. 2000) (holding that
subpoena violated state constitution “because Ms. King did not have notice
and an opportunity to object to the State’s subpoena of her medical records
in which she had not waived her right of privacy.”). See also In re Nwamu,
421 F. Supp. 1361 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), where FBI agents armed with a grand
jury subpoena seized items immediately as if the subpoena were a search
Taking possession of the items denied movants their right to
independent judicial determination of the existence of probable
cause as the basis for a search warrant, required by the Fourth
Amendment. . . . The very existence of a right to challenge
presupposes an opportunity to make it. That opportunity was
circumvented, frustrated and effectively foreclosed by the
methods employed here.
Hence, on facts essentially identical to this case, the Warshak I court
found that lack of prior notice to the email user was fatal to the
constitutionality of the § 2703(d) order at issue there. See Warshak I, 490
F.3d at 475, citing United States v. Phibbs, 999 F.2d 1053, 1077 (6th Cir.
1993). So too should this Court reject the government’s attempted end-run
around the Fourth Amendment and instead require it to obtain a search
warrant based on probable cause before searching and seizing emails
without prior notice to the account holder.6
C. THIS COURT HAS THE AUTHORITY AND THE
OBLIGATION TO ENSURE THAT ITS ORDERS
COMPLY WITH THE FOURTH AMENDMENT.
Amici agree that Yahoo! has standing to assert the Fourth Amendment
rights of its email users. See Yahoo! Br. at Section II. Such standing is
necessary to protect the user’s Fourth Amendment rights even when the
targeted email account-holder is ignorant of the current controversy and
unable to press his or her own rights. Courts in analogous situations have
found that Internet service providers and other third parties have standing to
raise the constitutional rights of their customers. See, e.g., In re Verizon
Importantly, any order this Court issues compelling the disclosure of the
Yahoo! emails should not reach every email in the targeted account, but
must instead satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement and
reasonably narrow the scope of the demand to only those emails that are
relevant to the government’s investigation. See Warshak I, 490 F.3d at 476
n.8; see also United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc., 579 F.3d at
998 (discussing special warrant procedures that are necessary “to maintain
the privacy of materials that are intermingled with seizable materials, and to
avoid turning a limited search for particular information into a general
search of office file systems and computer databases”), at 1005 (specifically
discussing email) and at 1006 (outlining special procedures that magistrates
must follow when issuing warrants or subpoenas in order to satisfy the
Fourth Amendment in “digital evidence cases”).
Internet Services, Inc., 257 F. Supp. 2d 244 (D.D.C. 2003), rev’d on other
grounds, Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. v. Verizon Internet
Services, Inc., 351 F.3d 1229 (D.C. Cir. 2003) (Internet service provider had
standing to challenge subpoena based on First Amendment rights of its
customers); Mia Luna, Inc. v. Hill, No. 1:08-CV-585, 2008 WL 4002964 at
*6-8 (N.D. Ga. Aug. 22, 2008) (adult entertainment venue had standing to
raise Fourth Amendment rights of customers when challenging police
roadblocks alleged to have been set up for the express purpose of hindering
the venue’s patrons); see also McVicker v. King, 02: 09-cv-00436, 2010 WL
786275 at *4 (W.D. Pa. Mar. 3, 2010) (noting that “[t]he trend among courts
which have been presented with this question is to hold that entities such as
newspapers, Internet service providers, and website hosts may, under the
principle of jus tertii standing, assert the rights of their readers and
subscribers”).
Regardless of Yahoo!’s standing, however, this Court also has the
inherent authority and the obligation under Article III to ensure that the
orders it issues are in accordance with the law, including the Constitution.
See Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S.A., 481 U.S. 787, 816
(1987) (Scalia, J., concurring) (“The judicial power is the power to decide,
in accordance with law, who should prevail in a case or controversy”)
(emphasis added); see also The Federalist No. 39, at 233 (James Madison)
(Garry Wills ed., 2003) (explaining that decisions of federal courts are “to be
impartially made, according to the rules of the Constitution; and all the usual
and most effectual precautions are taken to secure this impartiality”)
(emphasis added); James S. Liebman & William F. Ryan, “Some Effectual
Power”: The Quantity and Quality of Decisionmaking Required of Article
III Courts, 98 Colum. L. Rev. 696, 771 (1998) (concluding, after
exhaustively combing the records of the Constitutional Convention and
analyzing two centuries of federal court decisions, that “‘[T]he judicial
Power’ means the Article III judge’s authority and obligation, in all matters
over which jurisdiction is conferred, independently, finally, and effectually
to decide the whole case and nothing but the case on the basis, and so as to
maintain the supremacy, of the whole federal law.” (emphasis added)).
The Article III judicial power delegated to Court does not authorize
anything beyond what the Constitution allows, and requires the Court to
consider the limits of the Fourth Amendment when judging an ex parte
application by the government to intrude on an individual’s privacy. Failure
to consider the Fourth Amendment in this case would undermine the
Judiciary’s role in protecting individuals against unconstitutional searches
and seizures. See United States v. Jeffers, 342 U.S. 48, 51 (1951) (“Over
and again this Court has emphasized that the mandate of the Amendment
requires adherence to judicial processes.”); United States v. United States
District Court (Keith), 407 U.S. 297, 317 (1972) (“This judicial role accords
with our basic constitutional doctrine that individual freedoms will best be
preserved through a separation of powers and division of functions among
the different branches and levels of Government.”).
It is of no import that the email user whose Fourth Amendment rights
are at issue is not currently before the Court. Indeed, courts routinely
consider the Fourth Amendment rights of parties not before the court in the
context of ex parte law enforcement requests, not only and most obviously
when the government seeks a search warrant but also in the context of
§ 2703(d) requests. Recently, for example, a federal magistrate judge in
Pittsburgh relied in part on the Fourth Amendment when denying an
application for a § 2703(d) order compelling a cell phone company’s
disclosure of a subscriber’s cell phone location information. See In re
Application of U.S. for an Order Directing a Provider of Electronic
Communication Service to Disclose Records to the Government, 534 F.
Supp. 2d 585 (W.D. Pa. 2008). That decision was affirmed by the district
court after briefing by several of the Amici in this case, No. 07-524M, 2008
WL 4191511 (W.D. Pa. Sept. 10, 2008), and is currently on appeal to the
Third Circuit.7
Like the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, other magistrates and district
court judges have recently considered the Fourth Amendment issues raised
by similar ex parte applications by the government, even though the targets
were not before the court. See, e.g., In re Applications of U.S. for Orders
A recording of the Third Circuit’s Feb. 12, 2010 oral argument in that case
(No. 08-4227), where a substantial portion of the questions to government
and amici concerned the Fourth Amendment, is available on the Circuit
Court’s web site at http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/oralargument/audio/08-
4227-ApplicationofUSA.wma (last visited Apr. 11, 2010).
Authorizing the Use of Pen Registers, 515 F. Supp. 2d at 339 (rejecting on
Fourth Amendment grounds a government application for an order
authorizing pen register surveillance); In re Application of U.S. for an Order
Authorizing Installation and Use of a Pen Register and Trap and Trace
Device or Process, 441 F. Supp. 2d 816, 836-87 (S.D. Tex. 2006) (applying
constitutional avoidance and construing statute to deny government requests
to conduct pen register surveillance and track the location of a cell phone,
noting that “[t]he Government’s requests raise Fourth Amendment warning
flags, which threaten heavy weather if either were to be allowed”); and In re
Applications of U.S. for an Order Authorizing the Use of Two Pen Register
and Trap and Trace Devices, 632 F. Supp. 2d 202, 208-10 (E.D.N.Y. 2008)
(granting order authorizing location tracking of a cell phone but only after
considering Fourth Amendment arguments raised by Amici, and noting that
“applications under the Pen Register Statute and the SCA . . . directly
implicate Fourth Amendment concerns”).
Whether raised by Yahoo!, by Amici, or sua sponte by the Court, the
question of whether the requested order complies with the Fourth
Amendment should be addressed by the Court. The SCA itself was in part
an attempt by Congress to protect Fourth Amendment rights where those
rights may be unclear due to changing technologies.8 In passing the SCA
As the Senate Judiciary Committee’s report explained,
With the advent of computerized recordkeeping systems,
Americans have lost the ability to lock away a great deal of
and allowing for email providers like Yahoo! to move to quash or modify §
2703(d) orders, Congress revealed its intention that judges would continue to
play their familiar role as guardians of the Constitution, and the Fourth
Amendment in particular, in this context.
There may have been a lack of clarity in 1986 about the Fourth
Amendment status of stored email, but there is none today, see supra at
Section II. This Court should consider the Fourth Amendment’s
requirements in spite of the absence of the user in this proceeding. Indeed,
the importance is heightened here where the user is unable to raise such
arguments in this ex parte proceeding.
For the foregoing reasons, the government’s motion to compel
Yahoo!’s compliance with the § 2703(d) order should be denied.
personal and business information . . . . For the person or
business whose records are involved, the privacy or proprietary
interest in that information should not change. Nevertheless,
because it is subject to control by a third party computer
operator, the information may be subject to no constitutional
S. Rep. No. 99-541, at 3 (1986), reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. 3555,
3557; see also, e.g., Oversight on Communications Privacy: Hearing on
Privacy in Electronic Communications Before the Subcomm. on Patents,
Copyrights, and Trademarks of the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 98th Cong.
17 (1984) (“In this rapidly developing area of communications which range
from cellular non-wire telephone communications to microwave-fed
computer terminals, distinctions such as [whether a participant to an
electronic communication can claim a reasonable expectation of privacy] are
not always clear or obvious.”).
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FAX: (303) 825-0434
LOCAL COUNSEL FOR AMICI CURIAE
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