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July 05, 2004
News Flash - E-Mail is Not Private
On June 30 the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case of United States v. Councilman, officially affirmed what those of us who work in the fields of law and technology already knew; e-mail is not a private form of communication and can be read by virtually any interested party en-route to it's destination. This, of course, is directly opposite the presumption of privacy that most internet users hold. In the court's ruling for the defendant, it upheld a lower court's ruling that due to the underlying store and forward mechanism used to deliver e-mail the e-mail provider could not be charged under Federal criminal wiretap laws since at some point the e-mail in question would be stored on the provider's system and as such did not meet the legal definition of "interception" as required by the Wiretap Act. In holding to this extremely narrow reading of the Wiretap Act the court has essentially granted license to Internet Service Providers to infringe upon the privacy of their users at any time and for any reason. To the court's credit, the ruling does state that "it may well be that the protections of the Wiretap Act have been eviscerated as technology advances."
Judge Lipez, in his dissenting opinion, points out that
Under Councilman's approach, the government would be free to intercept all wire and electronic communications that are in temporary electronic storage without having to comply with the Wiretap Act's procedural protections. That means that the Government could install taps at telephone company switching stations to monitor phone conversations that are temporarily "stored" in electronic routers during transmission... It could install "packet sniffer," software, computer programs that record the contents of all of the packets traveling through a network, on the servers of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) without having to comply with the Wiretap Act... In short, Councilman's approach to the Wiretap Act would undo decades of practice and precedent regarding the scope of the Wiretap Act and would essentially render the Act irrelevant to the protection of wire and electronic privacy.
You can read the entire ruling here (PDF file).
If you would like to inform your Congressional representatives of your opinions concerning the Wiretap Act you can find the e-mail address here.
Posted by bcoffee at July 5, 2004 03:06 PM
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