Forwarded from: Mark Hoffer <hoffer53@private> Hello: Coming from the ISP side of things, this is a great sigh of relief. Before this ruling, some could have interpreted the law in a way that the ISP could not scan for viruses or block spam. I agree that email should not be snooped on, but every user should know that the privacy of an email is like that of a postcard. Now about this wiretap law - is it unlawful for me to use a packet sniffer to troubleshoot a customer's connection and to watch for malicious traffic on my network? -Mark Hoffer ----- Original Message ----- From: "InfoSec News" <isn@private> To: <isn@private> Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 7:33 AM Subject: [ISN] E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible > 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. _________________________________________ Help InfoSec News with a donation: http://www.c4i.org/donation.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jul 02 2004 - 06:23:47 PDT