Appeals Circuit Ruling: ISPs Can Read E-Mail

leviramsey writes "The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (covering Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island) has ruled that e-mail providers are not violating the law by reading users' e-mail without the user's consent. The decision finds that the Wiretap Act does not cover interception of communications where the communications are being stored, not transmitted. Perhaps OSDN should send the defendant, accused in 2001 of reading users emails in order to find out what they were interested in purchasing from Amazon, a T-shirt from ThinkGeek?"

Comments

Godamnit

[HackHackBoom]

This is just a completely perfect example of why Lawyers should be burned.

To hell with the SPIRIT of the law. We're lawyers and we need to follow the LETTER of the law. Assholes like this need to be burned from the godamned stake in the middle of the White House lawn.

New compression technology...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read an article about a new compression technology that uses the simple, but heretofore overlooked, process of multiplication. It works by taking the binary data out of a file and dividing the number by another number. Every computer file is really just a long string of 1's and 0's, which allows this total number to be divided, greatly reducing file sizes like never before. Think of it like representing 100 as 5 x 20. 5 and 20 are smaller and easily storeable, but when combined in the decompression application, they produce 100.

Using a compression number of 300, a 600 MB file can be compressed to 2 MB. This opens the window for all kinds of uses when combined with current broadband connections. Terabytes of data can be compressed to a fraction of the size and then decompressed on the fly by simply multiplying two numbers. Using a high compression number I bet I could fit my 120 GB hard drive onto a 650MB cd when this technology comes out.

Truly a new day for the internet in general, this is going to revolutionize everything (think high resolution full motion streamed video conferencing).

It's Already Pretty Easy

[StormyMonday]

Just browse over to Thawte for a free S/MIME cert (your choice of Outlook or Mozilla), install it, and start sending encrypted e-mail. (Yeah, S/MIME has Closed Source Cooties. Tough. It works.)

There are three reasons that more people don't encrypt their mail:

1. Some mailers won't handle S/MIME, and behave badly when they come across it (refusing to let you read a signed message, for example).

2. People's e-mail rituals don't include signing/encrypting mail. They don't do it because they don't do it.

3. Security mavens tend to run in full Paranoid Nazi mode. They tend to insist on solutions that are only needed if you insist on full anybody- to- anybody communication with a guarantee of no man in the middle. They also seem to think that "security" is synonymous with "how many times can we make the user type in his password?"

Because of #2 above (the real killer) nothing will be done until businesses start insisting on using secure mail. If I remember correctly, Microsoft Exchange has the capability to enforce this, as well as generating certs. No excuse for not using it.