Colone v. Superior Court of California, San Francisco County

(1) Whether federal statutes must contain express privilege language before courts may decide that Congress intended the statute to create an evidentiary privilege that abrogates the legislated subpoena and discovery rules, and impedes judicial truth-seeking, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 9th, 10th and 11th Circuits have ruled, or whether courts may read ambiguous silence in statutory text to impliedly create such a privilege, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia, 3rd and 5th Circuits, and the lower courts in this case, have ruled; and (2) whether the Stored Communications Act yields to judicial process, as the 9th Circuit has presumed, or whether the act impliedly creates a novel, unqualified evidentiary privilege for the Internet that bars judicial subpoenas requested by non-governmental litigants, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, the Ohio State Supreme Court, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and the lower courts in this case have ruled.