From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Mon Apr 29 2002 - 12:43:52 MDT
On Mon, 2002-04-29 at 10:16, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Mike Lorrey wrote:
> > The law is pretty clear that you can listen in to any conversation that
> > comes to your phone. A TCP/IP network is really just a modern version of
> > the old 'Party Line' phone system, where several residences were on the
>
> I don't believe this analogy is considered legally valid. Do
> you have some legal eveidence that it is? If it is then this
> situation must be correct immediately.
I think Mike is mostly correct, although it isn't as clear cut as a
normal phone wiretap because the courts haven't really settled the issue
conclusively as far as I know. In a nutshell, email does not meet the
criteria of having a "reasonable expectation of privacy", and so is not
protected like a phone line. From a legal standpoint, email has the same
status as a postcard (no reasonable expectation of privacy), not a
normal piece of mail or a phone call. The primary reason for this
distinction is that email message contents are not hidden from the
transit provider.
When the government wants to read someone's email, they have to get a
court order forcing the ISP to put a sniffer on their network, if they
don't have one already. What the government does with the sniffer is
their business though, and once they become part of the transit network,
they can look at anything they want. So the primary barrier to the
government reading your email is getting a court order to put a sniffer
on your ISP's network.
I know of at least one case personally where a person had their house
raided based on information randomly sniffed in email (this fact had to
be disclosed to the lawyers). What the law enforcement goons didn't
intuit was that while that person was talking about
buying/selling/possessing things that make one eligible for half a dozen
felonies where they were living (in California), the email discussions
were about things in a remote jurisdiction where they owned a place and
no laws were being broken. The raid happened under the assumption that
the place they were talking about in email was the same as the place
they were renting. Of course, this type of situation is the problem
with the concept to begin with. Unless the investigation is grounded in
the occurrence of an actual crime (rather than the mere suspicion with
no additional context), this type of crap allows the government to run
roughshod over your rights willy-nilly without any recourse for the
citizen. They government should not be allowed to even inconvenience a
person, never mind escalate it to the point of guys with guns kicking in
your door, without knowing if their "evidence" is even evidence of a
crime of some type.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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