competitors, Google, has created an entire business model around searching the contents of email in order to deliver targeted advertising, and it has done so for a decade. See, e.g., Jon
Healey, Privacy Advocates Attack Gmail – Again – for Email Scanning, Los Angeles Times,
Aug. 15, 2013, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/15/news/la-ol-google-gmailprivacy-reasonable-expectation-20130814 (last visited Mar. 7, 2014) (“As Google notes, this
practice has been a standard feature of Gmail since its inception in 2004.”). There is no reason to
believe that Apple or any other entity served with a warrant is incapable of doing what entities
responding to subpoenas have done under common law.
In its “seizure” section, the Application specifies that e-mails would only be “seized” if
they relate to specific people and companies. See Application at 16. On a more fundamental
level, the government surely knows how it intends to ultimately sort through the information
disclosed by Apple. If a wide disclosure followed by a government search violates the Fourth
Amendment, then the obvious answer is to have Apple perform the search using the criteria that
the government would itself use in the same way that a bank, in the example used above, might
find a particular type of document in its customer files.
This Court is aware that other district courts have held that the “Fourth Amendment does
not require the government to delegate a prescreening function to the internet service provider or
to ascertain which e-mails are relevant before copies are obtained from the internet service
provider for subsequent searching.” United States v. Taylor, 764 F. Supp. 2d 230, 237 (D.Me.
2011); accord United States v. Bickle, 10–CR–00565, 2011 WL 3798225, at *20 (D.Nev. July
21, 2011); United States v. Bowen, 689 F.Supp.2d 675, 682 (S.D.N.Y. 2010). But, in light of the
government’s repeated submission of overly broad warrants that violate the Fourth Amendment,
this Court can see no reasonable alternative other than to require the provider of an electronic
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