FBI rapped for reading emails

THE FBI overstepped US constitutional bounds by searching stored e-mails without a warrant, a federal appeals court has ruled.

A three-judge panel of the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals found that e-mail users should be allowed a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Surveillance of e-mails when they are being transmitted is restricted under wiretapping laws, but the government believed that emails stored on an ISP server could be snatched without a warrant.

Not so, said the robed but not wigged ones. The three judges said that e-mail was an ever-increasing mode of private communication. Protecting shared communications through this medium is as important to Fourth Amendment principles today as protecting telephone conversations has been in past, the court ruled.

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