A Lot More At Stake In TorrentSpy vs. MPAA Email Snooping Lawsuit

from the wiretapping-laws dept

Tue, Aug 5th 2008 7:50pm — Mike Masnick

For a few years now, we've been covering the battle between TorrentSpy and the MPAA. While TorrentSpy has given in and shut down on the question concerning the operations of its business, there was a separate legal question that is still being fought in court. As we noted recently, TorrentSpy has appealed the judge's ruling that the MPAA didn't break any laws in gaining access to its executives' emails. As you may recall, the MPAA hired a guy who hacked into TorrentSpy's servers to send copies of all the emails to himself first, which he then sold to the MPAA (he later regretted this decision and confessed to TorrentSpy, which is what resulted in the lawsuit in the first place). When the issue first came up in court, the MPAA played dumb, and pretended that it assumed the guy had legal access to the emails.

While this may seem like just a straight privacy case, the EFF, along with the ACLU and others, have filed a brief noting that there's much more at stake here. Specifically, the EFF is concerned that the court ruled that since the email messages were not technically "intercepted" under the wiretap act, due to the fact that the emails were stored, however briefly, on a mail server before they were copied and re-forwarded. In other words, as the EFF points out, if you have access to any server that handles a message as it travels across the internet, it's not "intercepted" for you to read that message. That has huge and very dangerous implications for any sort of internet wiretapping -- suggesting that as long as the government routed all communications through its own machines, it could read everything without a warrant. This case is about a lot more than a BitTorrent tracker battling the MPAA.

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

Filed Under: email, surveillance, wiretapping
Companies: mpaa, torrentspy

9 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

psycros, 5 Aug 2008 @ 10:00pm

Forget the larger Big Brother issues for a moment - if the guy actually HACKED into the server, and was paid to do so, then we're talking massive miscarriage of justice. If he wasn't a Torrentspy admin or anything then his access was by definition gained illegally. Case closed, MPAA loses. Any lawyer that has trouble proving that case should find a new line of work. I hope the MPAA is taken to the mat (and the cleaners) over this. God help us if our courts or the rest of the government starts deciding that some private organizations are allowed to steal information without penalty.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Ed, 6 Aug 2008 @ 12:28am

As for the intercept question, I was taught to treat email like a postcard. You send it in cleartext through an open network using other people's machines and there are no specific protections for email AFAIK.

It is like shouting to someone in a crowded park. Or maybe like playing that "pass the message along" game with complete strangers.

If you have something sensitive, use encryption. If you are tinfoil hat paranoid, buy tempest proof equipment.

Or just send boring email...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Mike F.M, 6 Aug 2008 @ 3:09am

Could it really go that far?
Based on this alone, I very much doubt that it could be extended to government routing everything through physical servers they have access to so that they could read anything and everything without warrents.

There would be so much uproar at the first mention of this.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Enrico Suarve, 6 Aug 2008 @ 3:27am
  
  Re: Could it really go that far?
  Is that the same uproar as caused by warrentless wiretapping and subsequent retrospective immunity, or would it be the same uproar generated by the revelation that US customs can take your electronic items and data without any justification and decide to hold onto them for years without needing to give a reason?
  
  Will it be as effective?
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Truthbringer, 6 Aug 2008 @ 4:42am

Privacy . . . you must be kidding?
Look George Bush and Karl Rove got the American people to willing give up pretty much any civil liberty or constiutional protection they wanted (along with state sovereignty and the balance of power among branches), simply by playing with some colors on an alert system and using some frankly insulting slogans. If those two idiots could so easily dupe the public, then the American people are simply too stupid to have any privacy in todays world. Im afraid that fight is over my friends.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
d0n0vAn, 6 Aug 2008 @ 8:23am

Privacy
If you think that the government doesn't read and/or listen to every electronic communication it can grab then you are a fool. The reality is that the government takes whatever steps necessary to perpetuate it's existence and your civil liberties be damned. I agree that the fight is over and we lost.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Derek, 6 Aug 2008 @ 10:20am

Email private? Not in its current state...
What Ed says (comment #2, above) is absolutely correct: basic email is about as secure as a postcard. It might actually be a bit of an understatement. Basic email bounces across various unsecured and unverified mailservers, almost like an online pinball machine. Legal or not, "intercepting" messages at these mailservers is a negligible task.

When using basic email, it might not be reasonable to expect any privacy, but would things have been different if the TorrentSpy executives were using security software? Would their clear intention to keep the missives private come into the judge's assessment of whether this is a case of "interception" or not?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Mischa, 6 Aug 2008 @ 12:21pm
  
  Re: Email private? Not in its current state...
  It is true that postcards are not very private, but that doesn't mean the Feds/police/etc can easily read them without "intercepting" them.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Dan, 6 Aug 2008 @ 6:14pm

Does that mean that we could some media moguls in GITMO?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]