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Save a Chatlog... Go to Prison?
Alien54 writes "You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail. New Hampshire is "two-party consent state" -- one of those jurisdictions that requires all parties to a conversation to consent before the conversation can be intercepted or recorded. The decision is the first of its kind to apply that standard to online chats, and the ruling is clearly supported by the text of the law. But it marks a blow to an investigative technique that has been routinely used by law enforcement, employers, ISPs and others, who often use video tape or othermeans to track criminals in chat rooms. This also has troublesome implications [for employers] monitoring of email and other forms of electronic communications."
In Soviet Russia, the conversation records YOU!
Maybe just a simple popup in AIM/Jabber/ICQ/Whatever is all that is needed:
l33tH@X0r wants to save this conversation.
Will you let them keep a copy?
[Yes] [No]
.. as soon as you type in the input line in the program and hit enter. The rest is a matter of *time shifting* and not necessarily limited to the "screen captures" mentioned in the article.. If this law was strictly enforced, chat itself could be conceivably illegal. And how about newsgroups? Similar there as well. email, etc.
big ole can a wurmes here....