* What if someone in your company is caught snooping on another's e-mail?
So you’ve got your e-mail backed up and archived, and the users are happy. The compliance audit was run yesterday and indications are that what was supposed to be available was, in fact, stored safely, journaled and is available when needed. Even better, your splendid management of Outlook challenges (oops, I almost wrote “problems”) apparently is delivering on your promise to the boss “to conform to all corporate guidelines and regulatory requirements, no matter what they throw at us!”
Way to go, big guy. Time to go upstairs and have that nice cup of management coffee.
You make your way up to the executive offices, visions of Krispy Kremes and Jamaican Blue Mountain served in real china mugs in your head. You turn the corner and … stop dead in your tracks. There, between two largish individuals in blue uniforms, is your CEO, being led off in handcuffs and muttering something that sounds like “…but it was only e-mail …”.
The last thing you hear is “Book ’em, Dano.”
Looks like it’s back to the world of Folgers Crystals and styrofoam for you.
It turns out that a bunch of other laws other than the ones relating to compliance also apply to e-mail, and it seems as if your job may not be over quite yet after all.
Last Friday the Boston Globe reported on a federal appeals court in Boston that found that a businessman charged with intercepting and reading his customers’ e-mails can be tried under federal wiretapping statutes. This case has been going on since 2001, when a federal wiretapping law was used against a storeowner who intercepted messages to his customers from an online competitor. The case has been in and out of the appellate court system ever since, with the defendant’s lawyers saying that the wiretap law did not apply because the e-mail was intercepted while it was stored in the memory of a computer, and not when it was traveling across a network.
On Thursday the appeals court ruled that “electronic communication includes transient electronic storage that is intrinsic to the communication process, and hence that interception of an e-mail message in such storage is an offense under the Wiretap Act.” In other words, right now it looks as if management can’t read someone else’s e-mail – customers, employees, you name it – without the permission of the intended recipient.
So just because you have your company’s compliance officer off your back for the time being doesn’t mean this is time to get complacent. Just see this article for a description of what is going on. If you really want to dive into this a bit deeper and see how all this may impact First Amendment rights, read the friend of the court brief prepared by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
