07-01-2004, 01:00 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
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E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible
"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. ...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. "
What this guy did was wrong. However, I don't know what law he broke. I have to agree that reading files on a computer is not a crime and doesn't fall under the WireTap act. Even if the contents of the file is meant for someone else. As long as you have legal access to that computer, then the files on it are fair game. Most email servers store the email as a plain text file on the hard disk, with no encryption and no directory permissions that would restrict a user from viewing those files. I think he's guilty of being a slime-ball. :wink:
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