If you’ve been reading Ars for awhile, you know how trivially easy it is for government agencies to access your e-mail. Thankfully, there’s been a modest amount of pressure in Washington, DC to change that.

The 1986-era Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) requires a warrant to obtain newly sent e-mail before it's been opened by the recipient. But once an e-mail has been opened, or once it's been sitting in the recipient's e-mail box for 180 days, a lower standard applies. (Of course in practice, that's not how anyone's e-mail works anymore.)

The latest iteration of possible reforms came last month when a new bill was re-introduced in the House of Representatives. The Obama Administration has indicated in a Congressional hearing that it would support changes to ditch that time-dependency.

So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Tax Division, as part of its job of tracking down and prosecuting tax dodgers, believes it has the authority to read your e-mails without obtaining a warrant under ECPA.

According to newly published documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the IRS seems to indicate that it’s definitely following the letter of the much-maligned federal law.

As the ACLU wrote on Wednesday:

A 2009 “Search Warrant Handbook” from the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel baldly asserts that “the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as e-mail messages stored on a server, because Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” Again in 2010, a presentation by the IRS Office of Chief Counsel asserts that the “[Fourth] Amendment Does Not Protect E-mails Stored on Server” and there is “No Privacy Expectation” in those e-mails. Other older documents corroborate that the IRS did not get warrants across the board. For example, the 2009 edition of the Internal Revenue Manual (the official compilation of IRS policies and procedures) explains that “the government may obtain the contents of electronic communication that has been in storage for more than 180 days” without a warrant.

The ACLU notes that the IRS’ policies have not changed even in the wake of Warshak. The famous 2010 Sixth Circuit decision found that federal authorities do need a warrant before they can access e-mail.