The tax man may have his hand in more than just your pocket.
The IRS routinely searches Americans’ emails, sometimes in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the American Civil Liberties Union claims.
The ACLU released a trove of documents on its website Wednesday that it obtained from the nation’s tax collection agency through a Freedom of Information Act request. The group says they “reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without a warrant.”
At issue is whether the IRS is violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution when it has not obtained a warrant before searching the email accounts of American citizens.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case of United States v. Warshak that the government needed to obtain a warrant for information on specific accounts, including private messages.
Nathan Freed Wessler, attorney for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, said on the group’s website that although the 247 pages it obtained do not clarify whether the IRS has obtained warrants to search email accounts since Warshak, “they suggest otherwise.”
“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,” Wessler wrote. “Not only that, but the IRS believed that the Fourth Amendment” — which protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures —”did not apply to email at all.”
The ACLU argues that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which gives the government the right to look at emails more than 180 days old without a search warrant, is badly outdated.
While the IRS has refused to say whether it obtains a search warrant every time it wants to poke into a private citizens’ email, the agency has justified not doing so in the past.
“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 communication,” the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel wrote in 2009.