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.
I don’t believe there’s anything that is or will ever be private on a computer connected to the internet. No matter how many firewalls, adware detectors, anti-virus programs, ghost alerts you my have, something or someone can and will get through. I still don’t store any financial information or pay any bills on-line for that reason.
If you have something to hide, use PGP (it won’t stop John Ashcroft but will stop your typical dweeb/pervert/nosey parker).
If you don’t have anything to hide, leave it cleartext and increase the “workload” of dweebs who have nothing better to do than read other people’s mail!
While it’s not a surprising ruling, it does seem a bit inconsistent, given that it’s a federal offense to use a scanner to eavesdrop on wireless telephone conversations…
Under the Homeland Security Act the gov may data mine our e-mail for keywords without a warrant. It’s probably not a good idea to even mention terrorism in e-mail, lest you get thrown in the pokey with no charge and no lawyer.
Notice that this is a very “technical” interpretation, based on the letter of the law.
It’s up to the government to change the law to keep up with the technology, so if this upsets you, contact your gov’t representatives and lobby them to update the laws.
Big brother returns. The best solution is to wear them out. Have fun creating emails with friends that purely silly. Get enough people doing it and there wil be black heliocopters landing and every neighborhood.
Wear out the McCarthys
It may be illegal to joke at airports about things but it not illegal to joke in private email. It would interesting to reveal snooping of private mail this way.
