Whether to encrypt email

[A new wrinkle on an old discussion.  Court decision at 
http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/03-1383-01A.pdf.]

E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible
By Kim Zetter

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,64043,00.html

08:40 AM Jun. 30, 2004 PT

E-mail privacy suffered a serious setback on Tuesday when a court of 
appeals ruled that an e-mail provider did not break the law in reading his 
customers' communications without their consent.

The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that Bradford C. 
Councilman did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously 
copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their 
transactions.

Councilman, owner of a website selling rare and out-of-print books, offered 
book-dealer customers e-mail accounts through his site. But unknown to 
those customers, Councilman installed code that intercepted and copied any 
e-mail that came to them from his competitor, Amazon.com. Although 
Councilman did not prevent the mail from reaching recipients, he read 
thousands of copied messages in order to know what books customers were 
seeking and gain a commercial advantage over Amazon.

Authorities charged Councilman with violating the Wiretap Act, which 
governs unauthorized interception of communication. But the court found 
that because the e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM, 
of the defendant's computer system when he copied them, he did not 
intercept them while they were in transit over wires and therefore did not 
violate the Wiretap Act, even though he copied the messages before the 
intended recipients read them. The court ruled that the messages were in 
storage rather than transit.

The court acknowledged in its decision (PDF) that the Wiretap Act, written 
before the advent of the Internet, is perhaps inadequate to address modern 
communication methods.

But critics said the decision represents a huge privacy setback for e-mail 
users.

[....]


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James S. Tyre                               mailto:[email protected]
Law Offices of James S. Tyre          310-839-4114/310-839-4602(fax)
10736 Jefferson Blvd., #512               Culver City, CA 90230-4969
Co-founder, The Censorware Project             http://censorware.net



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There is a read/write Web page with resources that will be linked there and used during the Seminar on PDFs for lawyers and legal applications:

http://Network-Lawyers.org/PDFLinks

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