IRS reads your email?

The IRS reads your email

April 11, 2013, 12:26 PM

By Jonnelle Marte

The Internal Revenue Service believes it doesn’t need a warrant to search through taxpayers’ emails, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

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The ACLU reviewed 247 pages of IRS records in an effort to see if the agency gets a warrant before reading people’s email, text messages and other digital communications. The records didn’t provide a clear answer but suggested that the IRS often doesn’t bother with a warrant before sifting through digital records during criminal investigations. “It’s been very clear under the law for many, many years that when the government wants to read the content of our letters, diaries or listen to our phone calls they need to get a warrant,” says Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU. “And the content in our emails is just as private.”
Part of the issue is that the law regulating how the government can access emails, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, is outdated, the group says. Enacted in 1986, the law only protects unopened email or email that has been stored on a server for 180 days or less. That means any email that’s been opened or stored for more than 180 days doesn’t require a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, a measure that was tested in a 2010 decision in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Warshak. The court found that the government needs probable cause before asking email providers to release messages. The ACLU review found that it was the IRS’s policy to read emails without a warrant before that ruling and that the IRS contends the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to email. But it’s not clear if the agency changed its policy after the ruling– something the ACLU is calling on the IRS to clarify.  The agency declined to comment.
The IRS can also check Facebook and Twitter accounts for signs that people may be lying on their tax returns, though the agency says it conducts audits based on the information taxpayers put on their returns, not on postings on social media sites. And agents cannot deceive people or use fake profiles to obtain information. Still, it’s a reminder to those playing fast and loose with their tax filings not to boast on Twitter about it, experts say.
The ACLU made similar document requests to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice. It expects the findings to be ready by the end of the month. “It’s really amazing to us that in 2013 the American public still doesn’t know what the legal standards are for the government to read our digital records,” says Wessler.

end quote from:
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/taxwatch/2013/04/11/the-irs-reads-your-email/