Federal courts have ruled that law enforcement officials may simply sign their own documents demanding the surrender of documents and information from virtually every company in America and those companies must comply.
This can be done with the long-standing requirement of a Judge verifying the Gestapo has probable cause and signing a search warrant giving the Gestapo permission to conduct said search.
It does not matter whether law enforcement is seeking you energy bill, access to your personal email or even the password to your social networking account, the Gestapo issue what is known as an administrative subpoena to virtually any company or third party and the served entity must comply.
Of course with the courts affirming the legality of such an egregious practice it is only a matter of time before some genius politicians argues the cost of administrative costs of Gestapo constantly issue such extrajudicial orders can be all but eliminated by forcing third parties to just provide continual open access to said information in the first place. Cybersecurity legislation sound familiar?
This is just another of a long series of surrenders of powers the framers of our Constitution explicitly assigned to non-Gestapo branches of government to assure said branches of the government can maintain a system of a checks and balances over the Gestapo.
Here’s more from the first or a 3 page Wired article on the courts ruling
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/08/28/consitution-courts-rule-american-gestapo-conduct-searches-warrant-176291/