A federal court decision granting stronger privacy protection to Web sites and e-mails has prosecutors worried about their ability to fight Internet-related crimes.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in January that unauthorized access to stored electronic communications could violate the federal Wiretap Act.
The Justice Department, in court papers, warns that the ruling could be "substantially impairing the ability of federal and state investigators and prosecutors to pursue and prosecute Internet crime of every kind."
The Los Angeles County district attorney's office, in a brief representing California prosecutors, said the decision "has placed investigation on the Internet in a state of legal turmoil."
Federal and local authorities said they are relying more and more on computers and the Internet to gather evidence for cases ranging from hunting down pedophiles to fighting consumer fraud.
Those authorities are hoping that the ruling, which applies to restricted-access Web sites and e-mails, is overturned. The appeals court is expected to announce within a couple of months whether it will reconsider.
The issue grew out of a dispute between Playa Del Rey pilot Robert C. Konop and his employer, Hawaiian Airlines.
Konop sued Hawaiian after a company vice president used other employees' names to log onto Konop's private Web site. The site contained bulletins critical of the airline that were not supposed to be seen by upper management.
Konop, who represented himself, argued in court that the vice president violated the Wiretap Act.
A U.S. District Court threw out Konop's claims, but a 9th Circuit panel reversed a key part of the district court's decision. The panel held that the Wiretap Act, which generally prohibits eavesdropping on communications "in transit," such as phone conversations, and certain stored communications, such as voice mail, also ought to cover other stored communications, such as messages posted on restricted-access Web sites and e-mails.
"It makes no more sense that a private message expressed in a digitized voice recording stored in a voice mailbox should be protected from interception, but the same words expressed in an e-mail stored in an electronic post office pending delivery should not," Senior Circuit Judge Robert Boochever wrote.
