Tuesday, July 6. 2004
It's not just a postcard, it's a postcard on a desk....
A recent court decision in Boston Federal Court applied a very old concept to the store-and-forward nature of electronic mail.
Essentially, the courts decided that if an email was "stored"...for any length of time... on a server, it was "owned" by that server and the email could be copied and stored for any reason. Federal wiretap laws do not apply, then, and only a much lower level warrant is needed to gain that information. The laws applied here were intended to apply to records stored in a filing cabinet, not for a few milliseconds on a hard drive.
This came up when a online bookstore got a brilliant idea - offer free email services for their customers, and then read the email to find out if they were buying from competitors. Amazingly, this decision got them off the hook!
Mark Rasch has a good discussion of the issue at SecurityFocus.
Essentially, the courts decided that if an email was "stored"...for any length of time... on a server, it was "owned" by that server and the email could be copied and stored for any reason. Federal wiretap laws do not apply, then, and only a much lower level warrant is needed to gain that information. The laws applied here were intended to apply to records stored in a filing cabinet, not for a few milliseconds on a hard drive.
This came up when a online bookstore got a brilliant idea - offer free email services for their customers, and then read the email to find out if they were buying from competitors. Amazingly, this decision got them off the hook!
Mark Rasch has a good discussion of the issue at SecurityFocus.
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