[privacy] Appeals Court Rules No Privacy Interest in IP Addresses, Email To/From Fields

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/appeals-court-r.html

Appeals Court Rules No Privacy Interest in IP Addresses, Email To/From
Fields

By Ryan Singel  <mailto:ryan () ryansingel net> EmailJuly 06, 2007 | 6:28:12 PM


The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday in
<http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/F0E09BB37A97D51A88257310004
D1DAC/$file/0550410.pdf?openelement> United States vs. Forester that IP
addresses and the To/From fields in emails are the legal equivalent of
dialed phone numbers and the government can get a court order to obtain them
without showing probable cause as would be needed in a search one's house.

The Court extended to the internet a 1979 case known as
<http://www.reason.com/blog/show/114088.html> Smith vs. Maryland, where the
Supreme Court found that individuals have no reasonable expectation of
privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they transmitted them to the
phone company in order to complete the call.  However, under Smith, the
contents of the calls could not be listened in on without proving probable
cause to a judge.

The Ninth Circuit, ruling in an appeal of an Ecstasy-drug ring conviction
found that emails' To/From fields and visited IP addresses were the
internet's equivalent of phone numbers.  For example, the government could
get a log that said a person visited to http://66.230.200.100   (Wikipedia's
address).  However, the court suggested that knowing full urls are very
close to content (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy) and would
likely require a higher burden of proof to obtain than mere IP addresses.

> From a footnote in the decision:

Surveillance techniques that enable the government to determine not only the
IP addresses that a person accesses but also the uniform resource locators
(URL) of the pages visited might be more constitutionally problematic. A
URL, unlike an IP address, identifies the particular document within a
website that a person views and thus reveals much more information about the
personþs Internet activity. For instance, a surveillance technique that
captures IP addresses would show only that a person visited the New York
Times' website at http://www.nytimes.com, whereas a technique that captures
URLs would also divulge the particular articles the person viewed.

Professor Orin Kerr
<http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_07_01-2007_07_07.shtml#1183760858>
questions whether the decision is about getting this information from an ISP
or whether it was from a device installed on a computer surreptitiously. He
suggests the latter should require a higher standard, but I'm not sure why?
Perhaps it's because that might require law enforcement to enter a person's
house?

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