A recent article on Wired "Obama Wants Computer Privacy Ruling Overturned" lead me to think that if the "Leader of the Free World" has this one so wrong, then maybe a few other people do too. This one is just too important to let slip by.
The case, which President Obama would like to see revisited centers around the infamous case of Major League Baseball players and steroid use, and how information was obtained on some of these people. The reality is, the technical issue of this case is one that reaches into every one of our lives, in ways which we have little control over. From the decision:
"the warrant was limited to the records of the ten players as to whom the government had probable cause. When the warrant was executed, however, the government seized and promptly reviewed the drug testing records for hundreds of players in Major League Baseball (and a great many other people)."
Think about this. What servers does your email go through? Do you use yahoo? Gmail? All of these peoples drug tests (which is confidential information, many were told at the time that it was completely anonymous!) were viewed by the police, simply by accident of where they were stored. This would be like the police getting a search warrant to look at the emails of a known criminal, but instead, browsing through everyone elses email who uses gmail.
Are you sure that set of turntables that you bought off craigslist wasn't stolen? Without this ruling, if anyone at your ISP were to commit a crime, and have their email on the same server as you, then the police could legitimately consider your email "in plain sight" and feel free to make sure that you haven't been talking to anyone that they know about.
If this ruling is overturned, it will be a dark day for anyone who uses email, and doesn't run their own mail server. Without this ruling, the police may as well be CC'd on every email that you send and receive. Every steamy love note, every purchase, all of it. All because, it happened to be stored on a computer that also stored the information of some under investigation.
(Edit: This comment from The Volokh Article demonstrates a real example of why this is important. Apparently this sort of "Grab and Search" has already been abused in Civil matters by the Church of Scientology)
