Court Overturns Ruling Saying Reading Someone's Email Isn't A Wiretap
from the semantics... dept
Last year, there was a big uproar over the fact that a court found that a bookseller who offered his customers free email accounts did not violate wiretapping laws by reading their emails in order to see what Amazon was offering as deals. The ruling hinged on the wording of wiretap laws. The judges in the case admitted they weren't comfortable with the decision, but the problem was in the way the law was worded. The law only applies to "intercepted" communications -- and since the messages were (temporarily) on a server, reading through them technically was not "intercepting" communications, since they already had them. It appears that a new ruling now reverses that ruling and says that it is wiretapping, and the original case can go on. While the end result may seem like a good thing, protecting the rights of individuals to keep their email private from their email providers, the decision is still questionable. The real problem here is the wiretap law that is not designed to handle this situation at all. The article above notes that the law hopefully will still be changed -- which would solve this issue. However, in the meantime, it does sound like the judges may have decided something not based on what the law actually says.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Point to Point
BIll
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Point to Point
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
does this apply to google?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: does this apply to google?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Panel
The panel's ruling last year was reckless in it's reasoning, in that "the messages were in storage rather than transit", therefore were exempt from the Wiretap Act. They completely ignored the intent of the law, which is to protect against unlawful wiretapping, instead focusing on wording technicalities in the law.
Essentially that panel gave a green light to interception via procmail. If that be the case, then according to that panel's reasoning, you'd be o.k. recording a conversation on a telephone then storing it to a sound file, which we all know to be quite ridiculous.
It leaves you wondering just how these panel judges get appointed in the first place.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]