MA- Prosecution vs. privacy

7-19-2008 Massachusetts:

TUCKED AWAY in an uncontroversial bill lengthening sentences for sex offenders in Massachusetts is a provision that expands the right of law enforcement officials to poke around - at their own discretion - in citizens' telephone, e-mail, and Internet records. Governor Patrick should tell legislators to drop or scale back this clause before he signs the overall bill.

Since 1966, prosecutors have been able to get telephone records without warrants. But getting access to e-mail and Internet records has required a grand jury subpoena. Attorney General Martha Coakley, who favors the expanded authority, sees it as simply a case of updating the tools prosecutors have to keep pace with new technology. She emphasizes, correctly, that the bill does not grant prosecutors access to any content. For that, a warrant is needed.

-Notice how the state ignores that e-mail addresses (knowledge of the actual address) is in the RSOs HOME which is protected by the 4th Amendment, this bill trys to get around constitutional protections.

But all technologies are not created equal. It is not clear that records of email and Internet use are so similar to telephone records that prosecutors should have the same broad right to examine them - without first convincing a judge or grand jury that doing so is critical to a criminal case. Under the bill, prosecutors would need only to claim "reasonable grounds to believe" that the records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."

Coakley refers to the measure's potential usefulness in investigating cases of child pornography, online threats, and identity theft. But nothing in the bill limits this new power to such cases. Her office cites the 1966 law as a precedent. While lawmakers sought it originally as a tool in bookmaking investigations, the wording of the law did not restrict its use to such cases. But this doesn't mean that, 32 years later, in an age of heightened sensitivity about privacy, the public wants prosecutors to have the same latitude to look at email and Internet records in connection with any form of criminal investigation.

The power that Coakley is seeking is quite different from the authority that Congress has unwisely granted the Bush administration to eavesdrop on telephone conversations without a warrant. But the measures have two elements in common. Each grants blanket immunity to the telecommunications companies involved, removing any incentive for them to blow the whistle on abusive practices. And each, by freeing officials of the need to get a warrant, eliminates the checks and balances that the court system can supply when prosecutors go on a fishing expedition. The governor should reject this bill and have the Legislature design one that is more focused on specific Internet-related crimes. ..News Source.. by The Boston Globe