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Comment by setra | Hacker News Reader

They can email those to you.

I don't think sending an email would legally count as a served subpoena, at least not unless you somehow (at the very least, but I doubt that's sufficient) indicated that you're fine with that? I'm not familiar with how this is practiced in the U.S., but in many EU countries, "regular" email is essentially useless in a court of law, even more so for something like a subpoena which needs to be served in person.

Email is definitely a valid way of serving subpoenas.

No evidence of receipt. No witness.

And?

Edit: Why the downvotes? cmurf certainly needs to elaborate as to why either of those would affect the validity of the thousands of subpoenas that have been served over email.

They absolutely affect the validity if people claim non-receipt. Subpoenaing cooperative people is easy - you use mail, or email, or whatever you want and they acknowledge the thing and respond. That's why email is common.

The question is how things go when someone doesn't feel like playing ball. With email and not-signed-for letters there's no reasonable way to prove that the person saw the content. "Spam probably ate it." "It must have gotten lost in the mail." And so on.

So hand-served (and signed letter) subpoenas remain relevant for when people are dodging you. The fact that many people do respond to email subpoenas doesn't relate to whether non-respondents can be charged for their failure.

>They absolutely affect the validity if people claim non-receipt. Subpoenaing cooperative people is easy - you use mail, or email, or whatever you want and they acknowledge the thing and respond. That's why email is common.

I'm well aware that it's easier to claim non-receipt, but that has no effect on the validity of the subpoena. An emailed subpoena is still valid.

>So hand-served (and signed letter) subpoenas remain relevant for when people are dodging you. The fact that many people do respond to email subpoenas doesn't relate to whether non-respondents can be charged for their failure.

I never claimed they don't, all I claimed was that email is a valid way of delivering subpoenas.

And I'm sure non-respondents can be charged for their failure if it can be proven that they actually saw the subpoena. Not all illegal activities are easy to prosecute.

In most cases receipt of an e-mailed subpoena could be shown to have been opened by looking at a mail provider's logs (ex Gmail). It's likely that a core developer for the Tor Project does not receive email in such a way, meaning receipt could be trivialy denied.

But this is all beside the point, because an NSL could never be sent to anyone over internet postcard. Clinton discussed national secrets over email and look what happened to her.

Can you provide a citation for that? It seems to be like it would be impossible to show proof that such an email was received[1], which I imagine is necessary to declare the subpoena served in a court of law. We do have some other means for sending things like that through the internet (mostly used by lawyers and courts), but I find it hard to believe that merely sending an email without (at the very least) prior contact where the servee indicates subpoenas can be served via email would hold up in court.

[1]: IIRC, in my country the courts ruled that a) SMTP logs of sending an email are not sufficient technical proof of delivery and b) even if it was, that's not enough because you cannot be expected to regularly check your email account and read new mail. Things might be different in the U.S., that's why I'm asking.

There's no need to prove that the subpoena was delivered unless the recipient claims otherwise. Email is regularly used to deliver subpoenas (in fact, it's probably the most common way to deliver them).

Quick google found several public examples of such subpoenas, like https://cock.li/transparency/2015-12-15-subpoena/00-2015-12-...

And in any case, if the recipient fraudulently claimed that they had not received the subpoena they'd be committing crime.

Edit: Am I wrong? Is the subpoena I linked a fake?

Interestingly, there's also this bit on their homepage[1]:

> In order for your subpoena / order to be processed, it must be sent to my lawyer. Do not send subpoenas to vc@cock.li or abuse@cock.li. Instead, E-mail or call me to request my lawyer's contact information.

It makes sense to have an established point of contact (which might be an email address) for LEAs if you're something like an ISP which regularly receives subpoenas. I'm more curious about subpoenas sent to individuals via email without any prior LEA contact.

It's also worth noting that the burden of proof for something like this is, at least in my country, on the sender's end, which is why all court communication is sent by registered post.

[1]: https://cock.li/abuse

The method of delivery doesn't really have any bearing on the validity of the subpoena, however with some methods it may be easier for the recipient to fraudulently claim that they didn't receive it.

I'm sure they'll use alternate methods if the emails are ignored.

Service of process is regulated at the state, and sometimes local, level. For you to assert that email is a generally valid method requires some evidence.

I don't know any jurisdiction where email is a valid way of serving a subpoena. There is actually a little bit of debate about it, but most people agree that in the federal system, a subpoena must be hand-delivered.

"I never received an email, your honor. I don't know what they are taking about. By the way, look at this cool statistic of how many emails get lost on their way from one mail server to the next"

if emailed, what prevents you from leaking it (along with other recent content of your email inbox) claiming somebody hacked your email ?

Fear of prison?

You can get into prison because someone hacked your email account?

If they dig into it and decide that you did it yourself, as the parent suggested, then yes, you would have a serious risk of prison time for willfully violating the NSL.

Did someone hack your email account?

You would expect such a claims to be severely scrutinied (including seizing all involved hardware for forensic analysis), and if you'd be making a false claim while having disseminated the information yourself, that would be a crime by itself in this scenario.

More importantly, what prevents half a dozen email servers from leaking it all over the place?

The notion that an NSL would be sent over internet postcard is laughable, whether or not it's true.

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