According a recent ruling by Judge Michael Mosman of Portland, Oregon stems from a case where the government had probable cause for a search and asked Google for nine months of the suspect’s email log from their GMail account in an effort to obtain evidence of a crime. The government also asked that the search warrant be sealed and that the suspect shouldn’t be told what was happening.

Many email services already state in their terms of service that they will cooperate with the government and give them the information when sought by a warrant. The problem with this new ruling allows the government to go in and search your email account without any sort of notice to the owner of the account. This reverses a previous ruling that required the government to issue a receipt to anyone whose email account they went through.

Though he says electronic communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure, those protections don’t apply to the e-mail user. If the government takes a look at your e-mail, the obligation to disclose what was searched ends at the Internet Service Provider.

Judge Mosman gives this analogy: If the government seizes a package sent by FedEx, the recipient and the sender don’t have to be told, as long as FedEx gets a copy of the warrant. Also, Mosman wrote that the government didn’t take any property, so to speak, because e-mail can be viewed from anywhere. He goes on to further say that the law remains unclear about whether information stored online is like a “virtual home”, which has increased demand for legislation that will clear up this problem.

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