The IRS, SEC and EPA want to read Americans emails without having to obtain a warrant
There’s a tie that binds the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s separate probes of SAC Capital Advisors LP founder Steven A. Cohen and Fabrice Tourre, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. vice president.
It’s old e-mails, which feature prominently as evidence in SEC enforcement actions.
How the agency obtains e-mails has become the subject of a Washington debate, pitting Wall Street’s top regulator against privacy advocates and Internet companies, which say the information they store should be as secure from government seizure as documents in a desk drawer.
The SEC is fighting legislation that would trim government access to personal and corporate e-mail kept for customers by third-party providers, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.
Bipartisan legislation requiring agencies to get warrants to access e-mails could have “a significant negative impact” on enforcement efforts, SEC Chairman Mary Jo White said in an April letter to Congress. The SEC, a civil regulatory agency, doesn’t have authority to obtain warrants.
“I think there’s critical mass to get this legislation through,” Kevin Richards, senior vice president for federal government affairs at TechAmerica, a Washington-based trade group with members including Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and International Business Machines Corp., said in an interview.
Reduced access to e-mails could harm some investigations, Steve Crimmins, a former SEC trial attorney who is now a partner at law firm K&L Gates LLP in Washington, said in an interview.
“In dealing with large corporations which have responsibly maintained e-mail communications, the SEC will be able to get all the e-mail it needs,” Crimmins said. “But in cases with less responsible entities or investigations just involving individuals, the SEC will be severely hampered in getting the evidence it needs to bring a case.”
The SEC has authority to issue administrative subpoenas, which require the recipient to hand over all relevant documents. However, many SEC probes are covert, so investigators subpoena information from third parties, such as trading records from a brokerage or e-mails from a third-party Internet service provider, without tipping off the subject.
The Senate measure would update a 1986 law by extending its warrant requirement for recent e-mails to those older than 180 days, which weren’t shielded when the statute was written.
“The bill as currently constituted could have a significant negative impact” on enforcement efforts, White said. She proposed allowing access to communications from Internet service providers if agencies first meet a judicial standard comparable to the one for criminal warrants.
White’s proposal is opposed by companies, including the biggest U.S. Web portal Yahoo, online storage provider Amazon.com Inc., electronic market hub EBay Inc., personal-finance software provider Intuit Inc., and search-engine leader Google Inc., in addition to groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Library Association. They said in a July 12 letter to Congress that the SEC sought a “sweeping change” that would allow other agencies conducting civil investigations, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, to get e-mail without warrants.
“It will no doubt be dubbed ‘the IRS exception’ because it would give all federal agencies including the Internal Revenue Service access to e-mail and internal communications without a warrant,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-26/sec-fraud-probes-said-to-suffer-if-e-mails-kept-private.html
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/11/can-the-irs-read-your-emails-without-a-warrant-or-does-it-at-least-think-it-can/