Guest guest Posted November 17, 2004 Report Share Posted November 17, 2004 Remember this article from July 6, 2004? “You’ve Got Mail and Court Says Others Can Read It” I found it by typing “court ruling email” into the search engine of my mail. The point of the article was that your stored messages are not legally protected from being read by others. Well, guess what? is thoughtfully and generously storing all of your email complete with flagging and other notation! Check out the search engine. At first I thought it was only group email, but I found a response from a Senator I wrote. The letter I wrote to the Senator did not show up. My guess is that everything a person sends or receives is stored. Perhaps politely and discretely pretends not to have stored the private email we send to others so we don’t feel spied on, or anything. I’m remembering the government goal of keeping a record of every email a person sends or receives, but I vaguely wondered how this would be done…“everything you do and say tracked and traced.” One good thing-you don’t have to worry about finding articles—just search the text for key word in your email. Don’t be parnanoid. Big Daddy love us! This is a gold mine for the Kitty Kelley’s of the world!! Better than the Census. Perhaps some day we can go back and read Uncle Bill’s email love letters to Aunt Hilda. All of this email could be released to the National Archives after 70 years… the possibilities are endless. Thank you, thank you, thank you Big Daddy! NewYork Times You & #39;ve Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It) July 6, 2004 By SAUL HANSELL When everything is working right, an e-mail message appears to zip instantaneously from the sender to the recipient's inbox. But in reality, most messages make several momentary stops as they are processed by various computers en route to their destination. Those short stops may make no difference to the users, but they make an enormous difference to the privacy that e-mail is accorded under federal law. Last week a federal appeals court in Boston ruled that federal wiretap laws do not apply to e-mail messages if they are stored, even for a millisecond, on the computers of the Internet providers that process them - meaning that it can be legal for the government or others to read such messages without a court order. The ruling was a surprise to many people, because in 1986 Congress specifically amended the wiretap laws to incorporate new technologies like e-mail. Some argue that the ruling's implications could affect emerging applications like Internet-based phone calls and Gmail, Google's new e-mail service, which shows advertising based on the content of a r's e-mail messages. " The court has eviscerated the protections that Congress established back in the 1980's, " said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group. But other experts argue that the Boston case will have little practical effect. The outcry, said Stuart Baker, a privacy lawyer with Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, is " much ado about nothing. " Mr. Baker pointed out that even under the broadest interpretation of the law, Congress made it easier for prosecutors and lawyers in civil cases to read other people's e-mail messages than to listen to their phone calls. The wiretap law - which requires prosecutors to prove their need for a wiretap and forbids civil litigants from ever using them - applies to e-mail messages only when they are in transit. But in a 1986 law, Congress created a second category, called stored communication, for messages that had been delivered to recipients' inboxes but not yet read. That law, the Stored Communications Act, grants significant protection to e-mail messages, but does not go as far as the wiretap law: it lets prosecutors have access to stored messages with a search warrant, while imposing stricter requirements on parties in civil suits. Interestingly, messages that have been read but remain on the Internet provider's computer system have very little protection. Prosecutors can typically gain access to an opened e-mail message with a simple subpoena rather than a search warrant. Similarly, lawyers in civil cases, including divorces, can subpoena opened e-mail messages. The case in Boston involved an online bookseller, now called Alibris. In 1998, the company offered e-mail accounts to book dealers and, hoping to gain market advantage, secretly copied messages they received from Amazon.com. In 1999, Alibris and one employee pleaded guilty to criminal wiretapping charges. But a supervisor, Bradford C. Councilman, fought the charges, saying he did not know about the scheme. He also moved to have the case dismissed on the ground that the wiretapping law did not apply. He argued that because the messages had been on the hard drive of Alibris's computer while they were being processed for delivery, they counted as stored communication. The wiretap law bans a company from monitoring the communications of its customers, except in a few cases. But it does not ban a company from reading customers' stored communications. " Congress recognized that any time you store communication, there is an inherent loss of privacy, " said Mr. Councilman's lawyer, Andrew Good of Good & Cormier in Boston. In 2003, a federal district court in Boston agreed with Mr. Councilman's interpretation of the wiretap law and dismissed the case. Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, affirmed that decision. Because most major Internet providers have explicit policies against reading their customers' e-mail messages, the ruling would seem to have little effect on most people. But this year Google is testing a service called Gmail, which electronically scans the content of the e-mail messages its customers receive and then displays related ads. Privacy groups have argued that the service is intrusive, and some have claimed it violates wiretap laws. The Councilman decision, if it stands, could undercut that argument. Federal prosecutors, who often argue that wiretap restrictions do not apply in government investigations, were in the somewhat surprising position of arguing that those same laws should apply to Mr. Councilman's conduct. A spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Boston said the department had not decided whether to appeal. Mr. Baker said that another federal appeals court ruling, in San Francisco, is already making it hard for prosecutors to retrieve e-mail that has been read and remains on an Internet provider's system. In that case, Theofel v. Farey-Jones, a small Internet provider responded to a subpoena by giving a lawyer copies of 339 e-mail messages received by two of its customers. The customers claimed the subpoena was so broad it violated the wiretap and stored communication laws. A district court agreed the subpoenas were too broad, but ruled they were within the law. The plaintiffs appealed, and the Justice Department filed a friend of the court brief arguing that the Stored Communications Act should not apply. In February, the appeals court ruled that e-mail stored on the computer server of an Internet provider is indeed covered by the Stored Communications Act, even after it has been read. The court noted that the act refers both to messages before they are delivered and to backup copies kept by the Internet provider. " An obvious purpose for storing a message on an I.S.P.'s server after delivery, " the court wrote, " is to provide a second copy of the message in the event that the user needs to download it again - if, for example, the message is accidentally erased from the user's own computer. " Calling e-mail " stored communication " does not necessarily reduce privacy protections for most e-mail users. While the Councilman ruling would limit the applicability of wiretap laws to e-mail, it appears to apply to a very small number of potential cases. The Theofel decision, by contrast, by defining more e-mail as " stored communications, " is restricting access to e-mail in a wide range of cases in the Ninth Circuit, and could have a far greater effect on privacy if courts in the rest of the country follow that ruling. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/technology/06net.html?ex=1090109781 & ei=1 & en=95\ 17aa47a82e2656 Meet the all-new My - Try it today! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted November 17, 2004 Report Share Posted November 17, 2004 (This is a follow up to an email I sent earlier today.) I recently sent an email concerning my perception that deleted email were still stored by . I was fooling around with the email search engine and thought I was accessing deleted email. Now I’m not sure about that, and I apologize for any misinformation on this subject. Perhaps I was mistaken about but, it turns out that the new gmail offered by Google on a test basis DOES store your email even after you delete it. Sorry for any misinformation, but I could be more right than I realize, too. Who knows the whole story? Not to worry, though. This is just a newer version of the party line phones where neighbors would occasionally listen in on a neighbor’s call for fun, or the small rural post office where the postal mistress sorted each piece of mail and knew all the goings on for each family in the community. Makes me feel so cozy—like a small community again! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/03/google_mail_is_evil_privacy/ Google Mail is Evil By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Published Saturday 3rd April 2004 21:44 GMT This week should have seen a public relations triumph for Google. The company began offering a free e-mail service with 100 times as much storage as 's $59.99 service. Instead the criticism has taken Google by surprise, as privacy advocates who had never before voiced criticism stepped forward. Google has previously responded to privacy concerns by saying, " we're nice, trust us " or pointing users to the company's mission statement of " do no evil " . Such trite sentiments didn't work this time; even The Drudge Report piled in. Google executives had ignored a fierce internal debate over the ethics of the service and on Wednesday afternoon rushed out a jokey April 1 press release, ostensibly to trump a New York Times scoop. But it isn't so much Google searching email that has caused the anxiety from privacy watchdogs this week, as the company's confused retention policy. What will Google do with that data? Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie. " Once users register for Gmail, Google would be able to make that connection, if it chose to, " Pam Dixon, head of the World Privacy Forum told the Los Angeles Times. " And if Google ever compared the two sets of data there are some people who would be chilled and embarrassed. " Richard Smith, formerly at the Privacy Foundation pointed out that " Google kind of makes it easy to connect all the dots together. " Rather than allay these fears, Google's accident-prone co-founder Larry Page refused to rule out a future policy of 'joining the dots'. A simple " No, Never " would have prevented much of the damage. But asked if Google planned to link Gmail users to their Web search queries, Page replied: " It might be really useful for us to know that information. I'd hate to rule anything like that out. " Google's Gmail privacy policy points out that your email will be retained even after you close your account - " The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account. " At a time when the American Library Association is advising librarians to destroy records of borrowing as soon as they can, to protect users privacy, it's an odd time to be boasting about infinite retention. Clearly there's something of a reality gap in the upper echelons of the Googleplex. There's a disconnect between the jokey launch, and the statement that " machines, not humans " will read email that's every bit as unnerving as a President making jokes while citizens are being dismembered. For archivist Daniel Brandt, it's reminiscent of the Doubleclick privacy scandal. " Doubleclick bought acquired a company that had names and address in their database, and gleefully announced that now they could monetize their massive cookie and web-bug database by correlating it with names of individuals, " he told us. " The privacy advocates jumped all over that one (it was in year 2000 or so), and Doubleclick had to abandon their plans. This time it's the same issue, but it's all within one company. " " While Google brags that no humans will read your emails, the entire Gmail program will involve extensive automated profiling of you as an individual. Google will be sharing the non-identifiable portions of your profile with anyone they choose. If the ownership of Google changes, or there is a merger, the entire personally-identifiable profile will be available to the new owners or partners. " Google has done an extraordinary job of sidestepping human responsibility by deploying machine rhetoric (what we call the 'Bill Gates defense') . But now it has to deal with grown ups, and this is its severest PR test yet. The rationale behind going public is business expansion; but Google can't add services unless people trust it.® External Link 'Delete your Google cookie before and after' Gmail " Privacy " Policy 'How I Leared To Stop Worrying' (and love Google) [incomprehensible] Related Stories Google launches email, takes the Bill Gates defense Google promotes Froogle Google revives discredited Microsoft privacy policy for Friendster clone Rips! Up! Privacy! Policy! 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