Slashdot Mirror
Where To Draw the Line When Punishing Email Snooping?
CWmike writes "While it might seem like a practical joke or a harmless, furtive glance, e-mail snooping could land you in more hot water than you'd ever expect — you could be charged with a federal crime. The recent case of a Philadelphia TV news anchor charged with breaking into his co-anchor's e-mail accounts shines a light on the seriousness of such snooping. Scott Christie, a former federal prosecutor who headed up the computer hacking section at the U.S. Attorney's Office, said, 'You look over someone's shoulder and read a personal letter and that's not a crime, so how can it be a crime to access someone's e-mail? It's not the same thing, of course... What you're doing when you're accessing e-mail is affirmatively exceeding your access to electronic documents and systems.' He adds: 'Usually, you're doing that by pretending to be that person to break into their account.'"
It's worth noting that the Philadelphia man accessed his co-worker's email over 500 times, and his use of the information he found was hardly harmless. However, the rules and conventions for email privacy are much less familiar to most people than the laws regarding snail mail. At what point does a privacy breach demand punishment?
Wasn't privacy declared dead some time ago? So, no punishment, I guess...
.... anothers snailmail?
then of course email should be treated the same, as it is private communication between sender and receiver.
You look over someone's shoulder and read a personal letter and that's not a crime, so how can it be a crime to access someone's e-mail
Talk about apples to oranges.
If you read somebody's letter over their shoulder, not a crime. If you read somebody email over their shoulder, same thing.
If you break into their postbox and open their mail, that would be more comparable to actually entering somebody's account without permission to read email...
Just make the deterrent/punishment the same as accessing someone's paper mail without permission.
Sure, in some cases you have to pretend "to be that person to break into their account", in which case you might throw a bit of "fraud" at them as well, but in most cases, accessing snail mail and accessing physical mail are similar enough.
If you are reading something over someone's shoulder, they can tell you to piss off, cover it up or whatever. The difference is actually going to the mail box (whether it be physical or electronic) and accessing what is in it.
Oh yeah, I guess it might be slightly harder to prove that someone has accessed the electronic box (because they don't have to open any envelopes), but considering you should be treating email as you would post cards anyway... (That is, anyone between you and the destination can read it, unless you take measures to encrypt it or something.)
-----
Disclaimer, I don't believe the state should exist. However, my opinions expressed above are given on the condition that my belief is suspended for the time being.
I wank in the shower.
Sigh. They are NOT repeat NOT talking about looking over someone's shoulder, or a furtive glance. They're talking about logging into another's email account and making the (damaging) contents public. But hey, this sort of confusion is what I expect from journalists - doesn't matter if they work for the New York Times or the Daily Shopper, they're all pretty much the same.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Except that e-mail is not US mail. You're confusing law about the US Postal Service (so snail mail) with e-mail.
US Mail and E-Mail are fundamentally different. With snailmail, the government guarantees the timely and confidential delivery of your message, and it is a federal crime for a third party to interfere with that contract. Contrast that against E-Mail, where confidentiality is never guaranteed - consider every virus scanner and Junk Mail filter along the transmission path. However, when a third party breaks into an email account, a different crime is being committed - identity theft.
Laws that specifically protect US Mail should not apply to crimes involving electronic mail. The act of impersonating the victim should be sufficient for prosecuting the offender.
A weak password does not waive the expectation of privacy and security at all. The fact that it is a password (read security access device) should clue you in to that. Bad argument.
Sometimes shit just happens. Really. But most of the time that I see anything bad happen to anyone, they were doing something stupid. Something stupid that either directly caused the situation, or made it much worse than it had to be. That includes me, by the way -- if I have an advantage over others it's that I can admit this and see these things as lessons to learn from instead of treating everything as though it's random chance, as though my choices have no impact on what happens to me. Poor decision-making remains the number one cause of most peoples' problems, which is a good thing in a way because it's preventable.
Try explaining this to most people, though, and see how far you get. Instead of saying "the power to change things for the better is in my hands" they say "so you're trying to blame this all on me?!" and they completely miss the point. Even if you don't directly cause things that happen to you, there is such a thing as making yourself available and allowing room for things to happen. It's disheartening because the way most people respond to anyone who says this leads me to believe that most of them want to be victims. When that's the case, they tend to get what they want.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Privacy is highly over rated. Much can be done for the greater good when the very concept of privacy vanishes. The really important idea is that all entities should be free to study and accumulate all information. That puts government, the citizen and business on equal footing.
From the past I wonder just how much privacy an American Indian who spent his entire life with a tiny tribe experienced. Chances are everyone knew every little thing about every other member of the tribe. Did harm flow from that? I sort of doubt it.
You know, my mailbox doesn't even have a lock on it, all anyone has to do is open it to read all the letters inside. It's still a federal offense to do so. 'Expectation of privacy' applies to mail no matter how weakly it's protected.
>So, if something isn't guaranteed (privacy), then it should be perfectly legal to do so?
Yes, as long as you have a legal right to be where you are, what you witness is perfectly acceptable.
I know there are gray areas like looking into windows from the road, and so on. But if you have a legal right to be where you are, what you witness from there is acceptable, and can be used as evidence.
If you do your "email snooping" while burglarizing an office, that's a crime.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
OK, I know that when you sign up the fine print gives them to right to study your emails. And I know that it's not a human being, but an automaton reading the email, and directing spam toward your screen. The Telcos are drifting in that direction. Ha, the NSA has plenty of company. And what happens when their (Google, Verizon, and the NSA) software gets good enough to be called intelligent?
Even if prosecutors aren't interested if you sign your right to privacy away, but this a good place to discuss the bigger picture.