LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
E-Mail Snooping Not Wiretapping
Posted by Rebecca Bolin on Thursday, July 01 @ 14:51:52 EDT Telecommunications
Massachusetts has ruled that an e-mail provider who copied and read customers' e-mails without their consent was not acting illegally. The court ruled that the mail was not in transit and was in storage since it was in the RAM of the provider's computer. Stored communications are not protected by the wiretap provisions of ECPA; they have lesser protection under the Stored Communications Act.

This e-mail had not reached its intended destination, a person, not a server, and old wiretap laws just don't mesh well with modern systems. This RAM storage distinction seems pretty hazy. Is VoIP stored when it passes through the servers' memory? As the court acknowledged, attempting to interpret ECPA to deal with Internet communications just isn't working. We need new legislation to handle these technologies more clearly.

Thanks to Alex Grinberg and his more in-depth analysis.

 
Related Links
· More about Telecommunications
· News by Rebecca Bolin


Most read story about Telecommunications:
The Irony of Propaganda

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
The PHP-Nuke engine on which LawMeme runs is copyright by PHP-Nuke, and is freely available under the GNU GPL.
Everything else is copyright copyright 2002-04 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php



Page Generation: 0.261 Seconds