Forwarded from: Marjorie Simmons <lawyer@private> http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64043,00.html By Kim Zetter June 30, 2004 E-mail privacy suffered a serious setback on Tuesday when a court of appeals ruled that an e-mail provider did not break the law in reading his customers' communications without their consent. The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that Bradford C. Councilman did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions. Councilman, owner of a website selling rare and out-of-print books, offered book dealer customers e-mail accounts through his site. But unknown to those customers, Councilman installed code that intercepted and copied any e-mail that came to them from his competitor, Amazon.com. Although Councilman did not prevent the mail from reaching recipients, he read thousands of copied messages in order to know what books customers were seeking and gain a commercial advantage over Amazon. Authorities charged Councilman with violating the Wiretap Act, which governs unauthorized interception of communication. But the court found that because the e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM, of the defendant's computer system when he copied them, he did not intercept them while they were in transit over wires and therefore did not violate the Wiretap Act, even though he copied the messages before the intended recipients read them. The court ruled that the messages were in storage rather than transit. The court acknowledged in its decision http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/03-1383-01A.pdf that the Wiretap Act, written before the advent of the Internet, was perhaps inadequate to address modern communication methods. . . . _________________________________________ Help InfoSec News with a donation: http://www.c4i.org/donation.html
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