U.S. law requires that law enforcement officials obtain a warrant to tap someone's phone or intercept e-mail. But after Sept. 11, 2001, "Bush secretly issued an executive order authorizing warrantless electronic intercepts for national security purposes -- even on U.S. citizens, as long as one party is suspected to be outside the country."
"E-mail is a slightly different matter. The law makes a distinction between intercepting e-mail in transit and obtaining stored e-mail from a service provider's servers.......These days, most e-mail is held and stored by third parties. So the government claims the authority to read someone's most intimate communications, including stored chat sessions, by serving a subpoena -- no probable cause required. A person may never even know that this has been done, as there is no legal requirement for an Internet service provider to provide notice......
"The same holds true for virtually any information held by a third party: phone company records that indicate who called you, when they called and how long the call lasted; Internet service provider records on what Web sites you visited, when and for how long; tollbooth records; security camera footage; records of emergency calls made from a car; supermarket purchase records. All that and more can be requested by the government with a search warrant, or sometimes with an administrative subpoena or other demand, frequently without judicial review."
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