The Bush Administration continues its ongoing assault on citizens' right to privacy, pursuing a lawsuit in an appeals court in Ohio in an attempt to gain the right to read your e-mail without a warrant.

Specifically, the feds say they should have a right to read e-mail left on a server, after you've already read it. "The Justice Department views an opened e-mail left on a service provider's computer as more like a postcard left on a table than a sealed letter in a drawer. Which is to say, its owner has no reasonable expectation of privacy," the LA Times reports (registration required).

The Justice Department is relying on a 1986 law forbidding the "interception and disclosure of e-mail and other online transmissions without a warrant. But there is an exception. If the messages are more than 180 days old, they can be obtained merely with a subpoena or a court order, which investigators can obtain more easily than a warrant."

At the time the law was written, and for more than a decade later, users used e-mail servers as temporary relay stations. But now, people use Web-based mail services as their primary mail accounts.

The change in technology not only makes the Justice Department's position absurd, it undermines the law's 180-day limit. When the law was drafted, e-mail was typically stored by Internet service providers only until a user dialed in and checked his or her account. It would then be sent to the subscriber's computer and deleted from the provider's servers. Lawmakers set the 180-day threshold to distinguish between wanted but unread mail and messages in an abandoned account. Now users store e-mail on the Web for years.

(Via Interesting People))