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?

Comments

Privacy?

[BSAtHome]

At what point does a privacy breach demand punishment?

Wasn't privacy declared dead some time ago? So, no punishment, I guess...

Re:Privacy?

[causality]

At what point does a privacy breach demand punishment?

Wasn't privacy declared dead some time ago? So, no punishment, I guess...

It certainly is dead if we don't stand up and demand it and if we choose not to punish those who violate it. We do have a choice in the matter, you know. We don't have to just sit back and do nothing and watch it slowly erode.

Of course the other angle is that there is plenty you can do to make your communications and your systems much more difficult to compromise. You can use encryption, you can refuse to use free services like Hotmail and Gmail for sensitive data, you can follow good security practices for how you administer your computer. You can also assume that someone somewhere really might target you, which that co-worker mentioned in the summary almost certainly did not do until it became evident that this was the case. Privacy is very much like freedom; the price is vigilance.

Crappy journalism - par for the course

[DNS-and-BIND]

"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."

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.

Re:Is not it a federal crime to interfer or open .

[janeuner]

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.