Re: Another round of viruses - encrypted this time

[Danny Sauer <sauer@cloudmaster.com>]

Dean Henrichsmeyer wrote:
> Umm... That is definitely not the case, especially not if you consider 
> yourself a service provider.

Yes, it is.  At home, I pay for the bandwidth, I pay for the machine, 
and I (and SMTP) provide no guarantee to any user (there are several 
users besides me) that their email is private in any way.  There are 
certainly professional ethics involved that prevent me from doing things 
that are just wrong (like reading everyone's mail), but there is no 
legal reason that I can't.

At work, I don't pay for anything, but again, it's company resources, 
not the users', and as "company" representative it's up to me as to 
whether or not I want to read everyone's email, append a corporate 
footer to the bottom of all outgoing messages, or crack the encryption 
on zip files that they're sending out.

In either case, using "my" resources implies agreement with "my" rules, 
whether "my" is the company I work for or literally me.  If I was an 
ISP, the situation would be similar, as there exist any number of 
reasons that I may need to examine the contents of messages that are 
using ISP resources.  I'll agree that you've got a little more to stand 
on there due to a "reasonable assumption of privacy" or some junk.  If I 
think dialup-234 might be doing something wrong, though, and I start 
logging data just because I can, I'm pretty sure that evidence holds up 
in court.  You're free to prove me wrong on that, though, as I'm pretty 
much pulling that out of my butt. :)

> You don't want it to work that way either; not unless you also want to 
> be *liable* for whatever  goes through your mail server (which would be 
> insane).

There *is* legal precedent on that count - I'm not necessarily liable 
for things that merely pass through my mail server just because they 
passed through.  If my mail server is used to flood something belonging 
to the FBI, though, it's entirely likely that they'll come looking for 
me whether I think I'm liable or not. :)  Access != liability.

--Danny, who doesn't generally read people's email, BTW, but could if he 
wanted to

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