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FL Court Rules Against Spouse-Installed Spyware
idobi writes "A Florida court ruled that it was illegal for a wife to install spyware on her husband's computer, in order to catch him in an extramarital affair. The three judge panel barred the woman from using the chat records from being introduced as evidence in the divorce proceedings. The court ruled that the software, Spector, violated Florida's wiretapping law - which states that it is criminal to 'intentionally intercept' any 'electronic communication.'"
I have a serious problem being told what I can do with my computer when others do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If I'm giving people shell accounts, I'm not going to sniff their traffic. On the other hand, I am very likely to install a keylogger on my console.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Many states have different laws regarding what is legal in terms of wiretapping; some allow one party to record a phone call only if all parties consent, and others, famously D.C., for instance, do not.
Most all of them recognize that, outside of law enforcement activity a 3rd party isn't permitted to eavesdrop.
One thing that occurs to me is that there have been a spate of decisions in a law enforcement context to the effect that electronic communications like email lack the same "expectation of privacy" that phone calls and postal mail do. Whereas this seems to acknowledge that chat serves a similar function to the phone, just with distinct technology, and thus extends the same protection.
The article briefly mentioned that while this wife wasn't allowed to wiretap her husband, her husband's employer is (while he's at work, anyway). I thought this was funny, the different standards between the workplace and the home. There are a variety of justifications for wiretapping your employees - something that, as far as I know in most states, employers have carte blanche to do - but the interesting thing is that when you start thinking about them, most of them apply to the spouse as well.
At work, you use your employer's computer, in your employer's building (their machine, their house), but the wife jointly owns both. At work, you may make the argument that wiretapping is necessary to insure reliability and integrity of your business, but the spouse can argue the same is necessary to insure the integrity of the marriage. Both will claim: "What's their privacy for anyway? Do they have something to hide?"
The only strong argument I can think of for surveillance by employers is that the employee "consents." I suppose spouses don't have the same leverage to compel "consent" to eavesdropping as employers do.
Ugly business, trying to get a job that will promise to respect your privacy. You can always "just work somewhere else," but there are quite a few things we already prevent employers from doing because "somewhere else" is nowhere if we don't.
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what is the difference between intercepting and storing chat room conversations, and taking photos of him smooching his mistress? Neither are methods which the target has consented to.
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Spyware must not exist. This might help.
Seriously, this is snooping with electronic communication. Maybe the case is not so bad, but this is not excusable. The judge did right in forbidding the logs as evidence.
that remotely installed spyware that takes advantage of security holes is also illegal? If so why aren't people in jail?
Laws rarely apply to the government. For example, the USA government is allowed to murder people and spy on them while citizens are not. Humorous if you only knew where to laugh.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
I know in some states the recording has to be known by at least one involved party, and some states require that both are made aware. In this case, it seems that neither party involved in the communications was aware of what was functionally a wiretap. The ruling, while good for privacy, seems extremely frustrating for those hoping to use the logs as evidence.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
So, if I think someone is gaining illegal access to my computer while I'm not around, I can't install a keylogger to figure out who it is?
This case is the equivalent of a woman hiding a camera in her own bedroom to catch her husband in the act, only to be told it's inadmissable because they didn't know they were being taped.
There need to be reasonable limits to this sort of stuff. Soon we won't be able to submit any evidence at all that was gathered without the permission of the accused...
"I'm sorry sir, I did not allow you to take that bloody knife covered in my finger prints"
Actually the law makes sense--you cannot wiretap your own phone or record conversations in many states without disclosing it to the third party (the no good cheatin' mistress, NOT the husband). I believe (because I don't really KNOW anything here, but it's slashdot, so I can post without knowledge but with authority) the wife would have to notify the mistress before recording their conversation (and possibly the husband, too.)
The court ruled that the software, Spector, violated Florida's wiretapping law - which states that it is criminal to 'intentionally intercept' any 'electronic communication.'"
So, does this apply to other, more illegitimate spyware as well, then?
Is it illegal to have that software on there to monitor your kid's use of the internet? Or do you have to tell them ahead of time?
Also, "not admissible as evidence" doesn't necessarily imply illegal, so it may be legal to monitor, but not to use against someone.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Personally, I've always stuck with the rule that if I think somebody is cheating on me. It doesn't matter whether or not they are. When you start to think that somebody is cheating on you, just call it quits. It doesn't matter if they were or not. You have already lost your trust in them. You will either find out your right and get upset and leave. Or you will press them until they get upset and leave you because you do not trust them. Why bother with the investigation? Just cut out the middle man and quit while you're ahead.
I hate how sometimes this comes up to near something personal. It shows how screwed up people are. My wife was searching sex search sites recently and I only discovered after some recent oddities when trying to fix her computer. It definitely woke up the relationship. Trust is so hard to rebuild though.
I spoke to a lawyer and in courts.. it ends up being next to useless. You may as well just leave the relationship... that being said.. it's not easy.
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So I guess the question in how far can you take this? Does this automatically mean that any spyware is wiretapping? After all, most adware does observe and report a person's internet browsing activity. But I'm sure some people would argue it's a gray line, because is sending URLs really a form of electronic communication? Does spyware 'listen' to enough human-inteprettable language to be considered a wiretap?
In a phone analogy, it's more like listening in on which phone number is being dialed, not the conversation. But in a lot of instances there is more information, thanks to the query string. A URL can tell an adware program what books someone is looking at on Amazon, or what they are searching for at Google.
Just thinking out loud....
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I'm not a lawyer (nor do I like abbreviations) but I kind of remember from when we bought a house, that once married, you are considered a single legal entity.
It typically applies to monetary arrangements (ie taxes, house, debt, etc). Each person in a marriage still retains their personal legal rights. For example you can punch yourself, but not your spouse.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
anyone who would partner with this woman would have to keep his PC under lock and key. Probably not a tradeoff most slashdotters would accept.
sulli
RTFJ.
I don't think it was the act of installing it that was the issue. She was capturing his conversations electronically. That is what violated the law, and that was the reason the conversations were not usable in court.
It shouldn't matter whose computer he was using, you aren't allowed to electronically intercept communications under Florida law. The how isn't important I don't think.
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No, to quote the article:
But Grincewicz concluded that "because the spyware installed by the wife intercepted the electronic communication contemporaneously with transmission, copied it and routed the copy to a file in the computer's hard drive, the electronic communications were intercepted in violation of the Florida Act."
It sounds like even if it had been a complete stranger using the woman's computer, it would have been illegal to record the conversation.
Maybe she can install anything. However, that doesn't mean she can use it to tap into otherwise private conversation. I'll have to duck and run after I type this, but it would be similar to installing LimeWire on your pc. LimeWire, by itself, isn't illegal. However, using it to download copyrighted material might be.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
"Homeland Security" -- which routinely intercepts electronic communication without a warrant
Either you're confusing the Dept. of Homeland Security with the NSA or the FBI, or else the Coast Guard and Transportation Safety Administration are branching way out from their original purposes.
Besides, anything the government does, by definition, isn't illegal. Look at Social Security... if a private citizen tried to run a Ponzi scheme, they'd be charged with fraud and thrown in jail. And if they then made people join at gunpoint, it'd be even worse.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I think its more of a case that if she can prove that the divorce is his fault, she gets a better financial settlement from the court. Without that proof, she has to settle for less. Now the court has taken away her (only?) evidence, she may have to settle for less, and her husband could potentially use this ruling against her in the divorce.
This is so true. My relationship to my long-time girlfriend turned fiancee, fell to pieces last year. She did lots of stuff to violate my trust in her, etc. so I got suspicious about other stuff, like her cheating on me, etc. Evenutually those thoughts consumed me, I started doing electronic monitoring, following her, checking cell phone records, etc and turned up empty (and I don't think I'm underestimating her tech savvy to avoid these things, she was never too sharp on just how much information one could gather from various places). At the same time though, I felt that I in turn had violated her trust by doing that. After a while we both conceeded that stuff was shot and called it off.
So case in point, the relationship was screwed regardless. If she was cheating it was done. In this case she wasn't but the trust eroded on both ends and it was done anyway. Had we ended it when it first popped up, we would have saved ourselves a bit of time, and several thousand dollars (i.e. wedding deposits that don't get returned).
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
This story, posted on the same day as the story about the thief who was caught by a web cam that uploaded its photos to an external server, brings home to me the changing nature of today's world. Electronic activity is inherently insecure and I'm beginning to think my baseline assumption ought to be this: someone is eavesdropping on everything I do.
My job allows a certain amount of free time at a PC with high-speed internet access and I make use of it. My employer certainly has the legal right and means to log every key I strike. Have I ever accessed my paypal account from work? Probably...so my employer (or my employer's IT guy) can probably purchase things on my credit card. How about my ebay account? Again, yes. Yahoo? Yes. Other accounts (like slashdot) and forums and blogs? These may all be open books to him/her/them/Big Brother. Fortunately I'm not a spy and not even particularly daring in my Googling ("office-appropriate websites" is my motto) so I expect I'm flying below the radar. But suppose someone really was interested? They could literally read my mail, and some of my personal email is...well...personal. Scarier still is the fact that I've used (I know, I oughtn't, but I'm human and it's embarassing to always be forgetting) certain short-cuts to help me remember which password belongs to which accounts and sometimes my screen name is the same from site to site. So someone could conceivably hack my yahoo account and use data learned there to access other accounts and basically domino-effect their way through my whole schizophrenic tree of online personas. Okay, I've mixed paranoia in there, but I really want to examine the worst-case scenario.
Proposed new worldview: every computer I use logs everything. Can I retain my privacy nevertheless?
For now, if I'm careful, yes. One key is staying below the radar, as it were. If I attract a lot of attention, I may become a target, but if I mind my own business, I'm not likely to be bothered. We're not yet at the point where everyone is considered a criminal. The man whose wife was suspicious wouldn't have gotten caught if he had not aroused her suspicions in the first place. (The method I recommend for avoiding arousing suspicions is to be scrupulously innocent; not a fail-safe, but a big help.)
If I pretend my employer is reading over my shoulder 100% of the time at work, I'm unlikely to type anything compromising.
If I pretend the other people in my household are reading over my shoulder at home, I'm likely to stay out of trouble too.
But where do I go if I want to be particularly clandestine, for example buy my wife a present without her knowing about it? Someplace anonymous. Anonymity is the great bastion of protection in the digital age. There are some freely available web-based email systems that do not even require a real name to register; with a working email address, one can open all sorts of online accounts. If I'm paranoid, I may open a unique account for the sole purpose of registering for a specific online activity, and never let the account mix with any other activity of mine.
In other words, if I'm careful, I can avoid linking myself to anything I do online. Say I use a public computer, perhaps at a library or an internet cafe, to open an anonymous free email account, and I use that email address to open a slashdot account. As long as I never access that email address again and never access the slashdot account at home or at work, I can avoid leaving a thread from it to me--even assuming every keystroke was logged on every computer I used.
That kind of covering my tracks is a pain, and not really necessary because I'm not up to villainy, but if I were paranoid, and I'm beginning to think I should be, it would offer protection.
But wait...anonymous public internet access is rapidly disappearing, even from libraries. One frequently must have a library account to use the library computer, and many libraries now use software that logs on a specific user f
Did you live in the state of Florida at the time? If so, have there been any changes to pertinent state law since then? Any other slight differences in the two cases (such as you being an ISP with justifiable access to such logs and data while this woman apparently just installed a keylogger or similar program)?
/. article.
Sorry to be blunt about it. I just wanted to point out that there are several reasons that might explain why this would have worked for you in 1996 but not for this Florida woman in 2005. I think that's why the state of Florida is such a critical piece of the issue, as suggested by the title of this
Ok where to begin..
First off they are married. Last I checked married couples own everything 50 / 50 or so in a perfect world. So how is installing software on "his" computer. It's His fault for getting caught, err doing it in the first place. I mean seriously. And it's not like she was watching a neighbor. They are married there is a legal requirement there, if not why have to get divorced in court?.
Preposterous
I seem to recall something not too long ago that discussed the issue as it pertained to parents and their kids. I can't remember if it was a local story, or on one of the national broadcasts. In any event, they basically stated that it may be against the law in certain states to spy on your kids, by listening to phone calls, intercepting internet communications, etc. I'm sure this can be extrapolated to include other adults.
Just the same, as far is it pertains to kids, I find this quite disturbing. It's easy to rail on parents who don't do their job, but it's completely insane with the law makes it illegal.
Well, then in another situation a person could say "I let him in my house which I own, therefore I can record the coversation which occurs therein." Which wouldn't fly either.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
There, I've said my peace.
But, this one goes to 11.
Which is precisely why the ruling is good for privacy. You should not be allowed to use logs of private conversations as evidence if the logs are obtained illegally.
There was a case where a man in California thought that a woman was harassing him and thought she was entraping him into a sexual harrasement suit. So he recorded all their conversations and just as he expected, she filed suit alleging sexual harrassment on 6 occasions. ....
.....
"A ha!", he thought, "i've got her". So he provided tapes of those exact 6 occassions showing no harrassement took place.
HE was tried and convicted on 6 counts of missdemenour Invasion of Privacy.
I read this awhile ago so I don't have exact information. Never less, in my IANAL view, for your case where:
The logs of a keylogger show your wife is doing something illegal.
a) If you installed the logging software to spy on your kids, and you wife knew this, then its probably perfectly legal to provide those logs to the police.
b) If you installed the logging software just to test it and by accident your wife used the computer and it recorded her conversation. You still broke the law in California (and elsewhere).
For case b, the solution is obvious. Call a lawyer, have the lawyer guide you into what kind of evidence is legal. Maybe you can provide the activity log from a firewall. Have the lawyer talk to the police, maybe they can set up their own logging software. Maybe you can work out a deal with the prosecutor. If you broke into your neighbour's house and discovered a half made nuclear device, they'll grant you immunity in a second. If you found they were taking the law tags off of their furniture, then you're going to jail.
There is no way you are liable for the actions of your wife if you act to correct the problem when you first learn of the illegal acts. If you cover it up for her, then your screwed. But be warned, the act of recording key strokes without the parties consent is an illegal act of its own.
Agreed. If the judge had allowed it as evidence, the precedent it set and the implications thereof would be downright frightening. I guess that's the sticky wicket of the justice system. Even if it was a murder trial with illegally obtained but incontrovertible proof of guilt, allowing the evidence would still be a precedent that should not be set.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri