NORTH COUNTY - A federal appeals court has ruled in an Escondido drug case that law-enforcement officers do not have to obtain a search warrant to do computer surveillance that reveals the addresses for Web sites people visit or the e-mail addresses for messages they send and receive.

The 17-page decision of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals marks the first time a federal appeals court anywhere in the country has addressed whether such actions are constitutional, Judge Raymond C. Fisher wrote in the court's opinion.

A local law professor said Tuesday the possibility exists for law enforcement to abuse its power to seek computer data and that it's a threat to the privacy of people, but he said he believed the court reached the correct legal decision.

The court's ruling involved the case of Dennis Louis Alba. He was sentenced in 2005 to 30 years in federal prison after being convicted of multiple charges related to the operation of an Ecstasy lab in Escondido. The lab was meant to produce enough of the drug to generate $10 million in profits each month, the appeals court decision stated.

Federal agents began conducting computer surveillance in May 2001 to monitor Alba's Internet and e-mail activity, the court's decision stated.

In the decision the court issued Friday, Fisher wrote for the court that the e-mail and Web site addresses do not reveal to government authorities any more information about the content of communications than a telephone number does.

"When the government learns the phone numbers a person has dialed, it may be able to determine the persons or entities to which the numbers correspond, but it does not know what was said in the actual conversations," Fisher wrote. "Similarly, when the government obtains the to/from addresses of a person's e-mails or the IP addresses of Web sites visited, it does not find out the contents of the messages or the particular pages on the Web sites the person viewed."

Computer surveillance techniques that can reveal content such as a particular document on a Web site that a person views would be "constitutionally problematic," Fisher wrote in a footnote in the court's opinion.

For example, an internet protocol address - a series of numbers sometimes described as a kind of street address for a computer - would show that someone visited The New York Times Web site at www.nytimes.com. Different information known as a uniform resource locator for the page would show what articles a person viewed on the Web site, the court's opinion stated.

A three-judge panel of the appeals court unanimously decided that computer surveillance used by federal agents to track down e-mail addresses, addresses for Web sites and the amount of data transmitted to and from an account was not a "search" subject to the U.S. Constitution and was not unconstitutional.

The appeals court ruled that the computer surveillance was "indistinguishable" from the use of a device called a pen register that records the numbers dialed on a phone line. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that using a pen register also was not a "search" and was permitted without a search warrant.

Fisher wrote for the court that people making a phone call have to disclose the phone numbers they are calling to the phone company to complete a call, so they have no expectation of privacy for the numbers. Similarly, people using the Internet and e-mail can only access Web sites and messages through Internet service providers - such as Cox Communications or America Online - and also have no expectation of privacy for those addresses, Fisher wrote.

David Steinberg, a law professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, said the framers of the U.S. Constitution were concerned about physical trespasses when they wrote the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. While computer surveillance can be abused, it is not a problem the Fourth Amendment was designed to address, Steinberg said.

"Is there still a potential for abuse? Of course there is," Steinberg said. "Anyone can abuse power. … Is there a threat to people's privacy? Yes, of course there is. But the (appeals court) approached it the right way."

Alba's attorney, Michael Crowley, said he believed authorities would not have been able to obtain court-ordered wiretaps and other evidence if they had not done the computer surveillance in dispute in Alba's case.

Crowley said he will ask a panel of 11 appeals court judges to hear the case and possibly change the court's ruling. The case also could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Crowley said.

"It's too important an issue not to take it as far as we can," he said.

Evidence obtained through the computer surveillance was not introduced against Alba at his trial, but was a "minor portion" of the government's request for a court order to use other surveillance methods, the ruling said. "More than enough other evidence" existed to obtain that court order even without the computer surveillance, the appeals court ruled.

- Contact staff writer Scott Marshall at (760) 631-6623 or smarshall@nctimes.com.

On the Net:

http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/F0E09BB37A97D51A88257310004D1DAC/$file/0550410.pdf?openelement