Slashdot Mirror
Court To Reconsider Decision On ISP Mail Snooping
thpr writes "In June, Slashdot reported that ISPs can read email (according to a decision by the 1st circuit court of appeals). In short, the court felt it was not a violation of U.S. wiretap laws. Last month, the Justice Department asked for the full court to reconsider the decision. C-Net now reports that the court will 'reconsider its June 29 decision'. Arguments are scheduled for Dec 8."
I would tend to agree with this ruling. I believe that an individual should protect her property as it's kind of like leaving a sofa on the curb not expecting it to be removed or like not having curtains on your windows and expecting people to not look in as the drive by. The property owner of the email should be protecting it via encryption or its there for anyone to read.
I like double rot-13; if it is encrypted and someone cracks it than I guess you should find a better encryption algorithm.
All they need is to declare that the FBI is an ISP... Voilà, problem solved!
John Ashcroft is fighting for greater privacy for email?
Wonder how the groupthink will justify this.
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There's an issue here?
I read my users' email all the time, to, uh, ummmmm, help tune my, um, spam filters.
Yeah, that's it, to tune my spam filters.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
ISPs can read mail. It is rather impossible to stop them from being able to read plain text data. It is a matter of if they choose to not do so.
If I placed a confidential document on the street with no protection can I arrest you for reading it?
Allowing Email to be read would help prevent spam and other illegal activities.
If you want to protect your Email you can encrypt it using one of the many available free applications/protocals. Which I recommend you do anyways!
of privacy as phones.
why sould it be that once I use a computer and/or the internet I must see my rights go down the tubes?
Hopefully, this is part of the reason why the Court is reconsidering its decision
If I had a real
I'm going to email myself the Goatse image 1000times/day from now on so whenever they read my email they get my opinions stated to them bluntly.
...using the wire-tapping law seems like trying to fit an oblong peg into a round hole. Close, but no dice.
The solution here is either to encrypt your email or to create a new law specifically forbidding ISPs from reading your email.
I prefer the former method to the latter. Laws forbidding an ISP from reading your email don't protect your email. They can act as a deterrent, but first you have to find out it occured, and then you have to prosecute. And then your email has already been read.
Or gmail? Or yahoo mail? You CAN'T send/read encrypted mail. Sure, there's husmail, but they only give 32 megs. Versus 1 gig on gmail.
You can read the order for an en banc rehearing here.
One of the questions they ask the parties to argue for the rehearing is "Whether the conduct at issue in this case could have been additionally, or alternatively, prosecuted under the Stored Communications Act?".
Hmmm, I wonder what the Stored Communications Act is? It seems the court might be worried that the SCA (whatever it is) already applies to email-snooping, so that the Wiretap Act should not apply.
Imagine if we go the route that many groups want which is to have local and state governments provide their own taxpayer-subsidized WiFi internet access, as is being talked about for Houston. It would be a disaster for civil liberties. It would be so much easier for the government to spy on you under the guise of the law and you'd have no recourse but to pray that private ISPs are still in business in your area, which they very well might not be with a cheap state-sponsored competitor.
There are of course limits that have to be placed on how private your messages are on an ISP's network. I personally have no problem with somebody that the ISP has detected has been systematically, egregiously violating state and federal laws with the ISP's resources getting spied on a bit to cover the ISP's ass. The ISP has a right, if it **happens** to find you systematically violating the law and putting it in any way at risk to see what you are up to. The only alternatives are a world where criminals have complete freedom of movement and the other is where the police actively spy on the public. I happen to like neither, but that's just me.
You also have to wonder why someone who is sending stuff that is so sensitive that they wouldn't want anyone but the recipient seeing it, wouldn't encrypt the message first. If nothing more write a little script that that scrambles the message based on some hack algorithm you come up with and send it via another email account to the recipient. It's not REALLY secure, but it's a little better than nothing.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
All -
With the tinfoil hat paranoia running at all time highs, it is interesting to note it was the DOJ, not the EFF or ACLU, that asked the full Appeals Court to reconsider this decision.
I guess that the nasty, civil rights stomping Ashcroft DOJ feels that wiretap laws apply in this situation. Curious.
Yours,
jordan
I'm a sys admin for an ISP for the last eight years. Do I read customers' email? Yes. Every single email that comes into our servers is "read". Not personally - but by scripts and filters.
The real effect (if this is passed) would be that some spammer gets a bounce message from a spam filter, sues a major ISP for "reading his email" and wins, and then ISPs drop spam filtering to keep from getting sued for privacy violations.
Would the affect Google's ability to scan GMail messages in order to place context ads?
...the CDT, EPIC, and the ALA. Here's their brief (in PDF).
Ryan Kennedy opposes comm
While the analogy was not perfect, information "theft" happens the moment unauthorized persons read the document. Even if it was on private property (i.e. i have a confidential letter in my briefcase, and it falls out in your office) the persons finding the document do not have an inherent right to read the letter. You see cases of this when a company sends a fax, at the bottom they include the blurb should the fax be sent to someone else by accident.
While e-mails are not in a sealed container (unless encrypted) a person has to go out of their way to inspect the e-mail. They have to, at the very least, double click (opening) the e-mail. The physical aspects of it are not really the issue, so much as the intent - the right to read someones messages.
I think every person and organization should be expected to follow the same privacy rights of the end users as the telephone companies. My reasoning goes to a much simpler level then things like someones "right" to privacy...my reasoning goes to this: I do not want people to read my private letters, so I realize that people do not want me to read their private letters (unless sent to me). I guess the Golden Rule applies here (for me at least).
Now since we live in a world of crime, if the gov't needs a legitimate reason to read my letters then so be it....unfortunately "legitimate" is a negotiable term.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.