Computers are being used in everyday life more and more. The problem with the increasing use of computers in everyday life makes it harder for security to catch up. Information security is a major issue all around the world because of the risk of valuable information getting stolen and misused. It’s such a major issue that countries and business spend billions of dollars to make their networks secure, but all IT professionals know that security is only affective when they see an attack happen and then learn ways to prevent it. Just like the United States view on computers with their “we’ll see it as it comes” strategy on computer security and laws. As the crimes are committed then the court cases are used to define the laws that we have now by their rulings.

To help protect its on citizen’s from unlawful searches and seizures in the United States is the fourth Amendment rights. The case WARSHAK vs. United States asked this question if e-mails required a warrant, to seize all of a person’s data from a third party. Warshak was under investigation from the federal government for mail and wire fraud, money laundering, and related federal offenses. The courts obtained an order to the internet service provider (ISP), NuVox Communications to turn over all information pertaining to Warshak’s e-mails accounts with NuVox. Included with this information was Warshak’s customer account information, billing information to include banking accounts. This was all done with a court order, using the Stored Communications Act. Warshak sued under the justification that his fourth amendment rights were violated. As the cases preceded the government tried to say that e-mail or any data held by a third party like an ISP, the defendant wavered all his rights to privacy. The judge threw this reasoning out because he used the telephone companies as an example. Just because two people talk on the phone, there is a sense of privacy in the conversation even though it goes through a third party which is the telephone companies. Then the federal government made the argument that since business were creating programs to search e-mails for child pornography that Warshak’s privacy with the ISP was invalid. The judge ruled against this because the search was done by a program and not by a human being. Since it was not done by a human then there is a sense of privacy. Since the federal government could not come up with a good argument why Warshak’s right to privacy was invalid, Warshak won the case. This case was very important because it established a business and a customer’s right to privacy and that a business doing a scan on their system for any reason could not compromise their customer’s privacies. What this does for the customer is their right to be protected from their information, such as e-mail and data, contained by a third party to be protected.

This document is in PDF format. To view it click here.