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Re:DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats by mpyne on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @11:02AM (#5674538)
The postal service is the only one of those mail carrier which you have listed that actually have legal standing for that privacy expectation though.

Regarding phones, those also have specific laws attempting to protect wireless (cellular) communications from eavesdropping (with the exception of legal wiretaps, which cellular providers are required to be able to support).

Likewise for pagers, those have specific laws making it illegal to intercept the communications sent to pagers.

For normal phones, a specific law had to be passed to require warrants for interception of communication (the "Wiretap Statute" from 1968, later extended by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986).

So the point to all of this is that those privacy "rights" that you talk about are not 4th Amendment rights at all, they are protections granted by specific legal action on the part of Congress. Had that legal action not been taken then you'd be right back in this same "interesting 4th Amendment question" that we're talking about for this.

The bottom line is that if you're willing to give info to a 3rd party unencrypted you need to assume the government can be given access to the same information unless there are specific laws forbidding it.

Re:DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats by axus on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @12:33PM (#5675162)
The anti-wiretapping laws are needed to prevent non-government entities from violating our security. The Fourth Amendment already clarifies that government must not violate the security of ourselves and our communications (papers), without a warrant naming the person being searched, and what is being sought.
Re:DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats by mpyne on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @12:49PM (#5675267)
Yes, but before those anti-wiretapping laws the phone company could theoretically do ad-hoc wiretapping of their own and voluntarily divulge that to the government. The only limit would have been that the phone company couldn't have wiretapped at the direct behest of the government since the Supreme Court had already ruled that the 4th Amendment applied [to the government] where the person had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The statute fixed that privacy issue and then put requirements on when wiretaps could be used by the government. Before this law and the Supreme Court decision the government was very... lax regarding warrants for wiretaps.

http://www.it.ojp.gov/default.aspx?area=privacy&page=128...

Re:DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats by bobbydavid on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @10:43PM (#5678471)
This is an interesting point. What about a safe deposit box at a bank, can the government search it without a warrant?
Re:DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats by mpyne on Thursday May 09, 2013 @10:54AM (#5680717)
You're mixing things up a bit. The government can't search things without a warrant where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. This applies to even things like DHL packages, the government can't tell the DHL delivery guy to hand over a package to them.

On the other hand, it's not a privacy violation for the DHL guy to voluntarily turn over material to the government and the government to use that as evidence against you. Think of the stereotypical "guy at the photo lab" who notices that someone dropped off child porn to be developed, you (sadly) used to see that in the news yearly, and no one thought anything of that being turned over to the government.

In some cases third-party services have privacy protections added by law. E.g. the cellular communications interception thing, it used to be very easy indeed to intercept a cell phone call just by sticking up an antenna. In 1994 the law was changed to make it illegal to intercept those calls in most scenarios, and require search warrants even for that "public transmission" of communications (but the law also required cell phone companies to make it possible to wiretap, the "CALEA" provisions).

Given how strictly regulated banks are I would be very surprised if there are not similar laws providing some semblance of legal protection to the contents of safe deposit boxes, but I'm not sure and don't have time to Google it.