Who's Reading Your E-Mail?

[DudeAsInCool]

BOSTON - In an online eavesdropping case with potentially profound implications, a federal appeals court ruled it was acceptable for a company that offered e-mail service to surreptitiously track its subscribers' messages.

A now defunct online literary clearinghouse, Interloc Inc., made copies of the e-mails in 1998 so it could peruse messages sent to its subscribers by rival Amazon.com Inc. An Interloc executive was subsequently indicted on an illegal wiretapping charge.

An advocacy group said Tuesday's ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news -web sites) opens the door to further interpretations of the federal Wiretap Act that could erode personal privacy rights.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a...cepted_e_mail_3

[Ken]

I thought they were already doing this?

You always hear the "boss is reading my e-mail" jokes.

[DudeAsInCool]

More on this story:

You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It)

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: July 6, 2004

hen everything is working right, an e-mail message appears to zip instantaneously from the sender to the recipient's inbox. But in reality, most messages make several momentary stops as they are processed by various computers en route to their destination.

Those short stops may make no difference to the users, but they make an enormous difference to the privacy that e-mail is accorded under federal law.

Last week a federal appeals court in Boston ruled that federal wiretap laws do not apply to e-mail messages if they are stored, even for a millisecond, on the computers of the Internet providers that process them - meaning that it can be legal for the government or others to read such messages without a court order.

The ruling was a surprise to many people, because in 1986 Congress specifically amended the wiretap laws to incorporate new technologies like e-mail. Some argue that the ruling's implications could affect emerging applications like Internet-based phone calls and Gmail, Google's new e-mail service, which shows advertising based on the content of a subscriber's e-mail messages.

"The court has eviscerated the protections that Congress established back in the 1980's," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group.

But other experts argue that the Boston case will have little practical effect. The outcry, said Stuart Baker, a privacy lawyer with Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, is "much ado about nothing."

Mr. Baker pointed out that even under the broadest interpretation of the law, Congress made it easier for prosecutors and lawyers in civil cases to read other people's e-mail messages than to listen to their phone calls. The wiretap law - which requires prosecutors to prove their need for a wiretap and forbids civil litigants from ever using them - applies to e-mail messages only when they are in transit.

But in a 1986 law, Congress created a second category, called stored communication, for messages that had been delivered to recipients' inboxes but not yet read. That law, the Stored Communications Act, grants significant protection to e-mail messages, but does not go as far as the wiretap law: it lets prosecutors have access to stored messages with a search warrant, while imposing stricter requirements on parties in civil suits.

Interestingly, messages that have been read but remain on the Internet provider's computer system have very little protection. Prosecutors can typically gain access to an opened e-mail message with a simple subpoena rather than a search warrant. Similarly, lawyers in civil cases, including divorces, can subpoena opened e-mail messages.

The case in Boston involved an online bookseller, now called Alibris. In 1998, the company offered e-mail accounts to book dealers and, hoping to gain market advantage, secretly copied messages they received from Amazon.com. In 1999, Alibris and one employee pleaded guilty to criminal wiretapping charges.

But a supervisor, Bradford C. Councilman, fought the charges, saying he did not know about the scheme. He also moved to have the case dismissed on the ground that the wiretapping law did not apply. He argued that because the messages had been on the hard drive of Alibris's computer while they were being processed for delivery, they counted as stored communication. The wiretap law bans a company from monitoring the communications of its customers, except in a few cases. But it does not ban a company from reading customers' stored communications.

"Congress recognized that any time you store communication, there is an inherent loss of privacy," said Mr. Councilman's lawyer, Andrew Good of Good & Cormier in Boston.

In 2003, a federal district court in Boston agreed with Mr. Councilman's interpretation of the wiretap law and dismissed the case. Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, affirmed that decision.

Because most major Internet providers have explicit policies against reading their customers' e-mail messages, the ruling would seem to have little effect on most people.

You can rad the full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/technology/06net.html

[desdemona]

July 7, 2004

Who's Reading Your E-Mail?

There's an old adage, relatively old at least, that says you shouldn't write anything in an e-mail that you don't want the whole world to see. A three-judge federal appeals court panel hammered home that point last week when it ruled 2 to 1 that e-mail service providers can copy and read messages intended for their customers.

Under the ruling, issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in Massachusetts, businesses and the U.S. government have more legal latitude to monitor private e-mail correspondence than ever before. The ruling allows the government to use search warrants to read e-mail correspondence rather seek a judge's permission for a wiretap, which is more difficult to get. No surprise, civil liberties groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center say this ruling will erode U.S. privacy rights.

The case concerned former e-mail service provider and out-of-print bookseller Interloc Inc., whose vice president told the company's engineers in early 1998 to copy and store incoming mail from Amazon.com. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston charged the company with violating wiretap and communications intercept laws, but the appeals court ruled that the company did this legally because the e-mail messages were stored in the company's servers.

Some of the nation's largest Internet service providers, including America Online, EarthLink, Comcast and Yahoo, said that they only disclose personal information under requests from law enforcement authorities and that they do not read their customers' e-mail messages.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/techn...&referrer=email