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Criminal Subpoenas for Online Data

By Ben Barnett and Rebecca Kahan Waldman
October 02, 2014

The amount of electronically stored information (ESI) in the digital universe is staggering and increasing exponentially. Much of this data is personal. According to IBM, every day, people globally send 294 billion e-mails, publish 230 million Tweets, and upload 100 terabytes of data to Facebook. These statistics account for a small fraction of online ESI, which can include purchase invoices, travel itineraries, contact lists, private correspondence, photographs, calendar appointments, tax documents, medical information, and so on. A collection of such digital information provides an archive of an individual's personal life ' more detailed, reliable, and intimate than the most meticulously maintained diary or scrapbook. This phenomenon is equally true in the business world. The average American office worker creates 1.8 million megabytes of ESI each year, and more companies are considering moving their enterprise data into cloud storage to manage this growth.

The Fourth Amendment

Never before has so much personal data been available anywhere but also completely outside the immediate control of the person who created it. After all, ESI saved in online accounts is stored on both an individual's hard drive and on third-party servers. For this reason, when the federal government wants access to certain personal information for investigations or other law enforcement activity, it need not ask the individual or business that created the data, but can turn to the party controlling the servers on which the data is stored. Today, companies like Google and Facebook are the entities responding to government search warrants and subpoenas for individuals' personal information.

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