In case you thought you had any privacy left it now appears that the IRS also seems to not care about your 4th Amendment rights believing that they have the right to read your emails without a warrant. Hell, they should come read my email; that would keep an entire team busy for weeks with the thousands of spam emails I receive.

Last year, the ACLU sent a FOIA request to the IRS seeking records regarding whether it gets a warrant before reading people’s email, text messages and other private electronic communications. The IRS has now responded by sending us 247 pages of records describing the policies and practices of its criminal investigative arm when seeking the contents of emails and other electronic communications.

That’s right. The IRS responded with 247 pages. Not a yes, not a no, not even a sometimes, but an obvious stonewall. Too bad for the IRS, as the ACLU mentioned above, they too the time to read it.

The documents the ACLU obtained make clear that, before Warshak, it was the policy of the IRS to read people’s email without getting a warrant. Not only that, but the IRS believed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to email at all. A 2009 “Search Warrant Handbook” from the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel baldly asserts that “the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” Again in 2010, a presentation by the IRS Office of Chief Counsel asserts that the “4th Amendment Does Not Protect Emails Stored on Server” and there is “No Privacy Expectation” in those emails.

We covered the main points here but you can read it all at http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/new-documents-suggest-irs-reads-emails-without-warrant