In Defense of the Way Things Are

Maybe I'm crazy, but I’m just not as concerned by the perceived lack of privacy in the Digital Age as some of you seem to be. New technologies have provided law enforcement with the ability to identify and track down criminals with remarkable exactness and efficiency, and in my opinion the government should have the ability to use these technologies to their full potential. The question at hand is whether such use is an invasion of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy; I do not think it is.
As the Forrester decision makes clear, seizing IP addresses and e-mail To/From fields is little different from keeping a pen register or taking note of the return address on a piece of snail mail. Such practices are not especially invasive: the actual content of the missives are kept private in each case. I especially like Alex’s analogy of the IP address as a sort of Internet GPS device. Case law has shown that the government has a right to see where people were, but not what they were doing in these places. When it comes to monitoring actual content, the government still needs a warrant, so we still have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I agree with the sentiment that the prevailing case law is sometimes poorly reasoned, but that does not diminish its usefulness. The courts have looked to dependence on a third-party intermediary, whether the phone company, the ISP, or the government itself, as evidence that the individuals using these media of communication had no reasonable expectation of privacy. This standard does not hold up well in the case of the Internet, where, as Eric points out “…information is split up across various paths and delivered in bits; only the original sender and the intended recipient have access to the full information sent.” Nevertheless, I fail to see the harm in allowing the government to look at our e-mail addresses.
Normally, I would hesitate to argue that there’s nothing wrong with giving up information if you have nothing to hide, but in this case I don’t because the amount of information we are giving up is so small (only the routing information), and the potential advantage to law enforcement agencies so great. The greatest reason that the individuals in Smith v Maryland and US v Forrester objected to government efforts to, allegedly, invade their privacy was that they had done something illegal and were looking to cover their tracks. The use of technology has already greatly assisted in the prosecution of criminals who would otherwise have gotten away, and will continue to do so.
This line of thinking is, admittedly, utilitarian. But so long as content is protected, I am not concerned that the United States will become a surveillance state.
My question: Do you think having a password-protected email account gives someone a reasonable expectation of privacy to the headers on their individual emails as well as to their content? If you think of the password protection as the seal on a letter rather than a sort of invisible ink, then it might not.