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Stored Email Not Protected by Law
dbrower writes: "A recent decision reported by law.com shows your email isn't protected hardly at all by the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA). In this case, an employer was free to root around archives of old mail to nail an employee. The court ruled that the protections of the ECPA may apply to the mail spool and the transmission, but not backup copies of your 'Sent' mail. Well, maybe not all that astonishing -- relying on law to protect you from the BOFH at work was never going to work, was it? The message seems to be: send potentially incriminating mail from accounts not under your boss's control." Other courts have come to much the same conclusion. Once your email stops moving, it isn't a violation of Federal law to read it (although other laws could be violated in the process of gaining access to it).
There are two scary aspects to this decision:
1) It pretty much renders irrelevant the limited protections we did have against reading other peoples' e-mail -- you can't "intercept" it, but you can read it from the hard drive after it has been sent on. And while this decision applies to a company reading e-mail sent from its own computers, I don't see what will keep ISP's from reading your mail...
2) The guy was basically fired for reporting his employer for possible violations of the law. If the court considered that at all, it's not in the news report -- but it should NEVER be legal to retaliate because someone called the cops...