Lawmakers look to curb e-mail eavesdropping

Four members of the U.S. House of Representatives are hoping to prevent a repeat of a recent court decision acquitting a man accused of e-mail interception. In that case, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Bradford Councilman, a former executive for an online bookseller, did not violate federal wiretap laws by allegedly snooping on e-mail that Amazon.com sent to customers through accounts Councilman provided.

Banning that behavior is necessary "to modernize America's privacy laws," said Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., who is cosponsoring the measure with Roscoe Bartlett, R-Mass., Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and William Delahunt, D-Mass. Their E-Mail Privacy Act, introduced Friday, would alter current laws to outlaw that form of e-mail eavesdropping. Their bill says Internet providers could intercept e-mail only "to the extent the access is a necessary incident to the rendition of the service, the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that service" or to honor a government request.

I have to wonder...

Just how far government will go. While I am totally against wiretapping without due process, it is dangerous to prevent an ISP or network owner/admin from intercepting email. Consider that spam and virus filters do precisely that in order to keep junk from traversing the network and that many of those filters look at "strings" of characters to determine whether that content is "bad." In order for network administrators to keep up with spam and viruses, they must examine content to find the consistent strings in order to implement rules for those "signatures." Just how can this be done without intercepting email?

Any legislation enacted had better be narrow enough to cover the specific intent of providing privacy to users rather than being so broad as to negate any efforts to prevent the scourge of the internet. Placing any liabiltiy on a provider of any email server for doing so is defeating those efforts because of fear of libability. I sure wouldn't provide spam or virus filtering if I thought I might be hauled into court for intercepting messages of any kind coming through my server. I'd just not provide the service any longer or charge a nice fat fee for allowing all that unnecessary traffic I have to pay for.

The problem with our lawmakers is that they don't have the expertise to properly draft legislation having anything to do with technology.

Another thing...

Of course, one possibility might be to allow "text only" messages (no html or graphics) and no attachments. That would cut out lots of spam without filtering, would not allow malicious scripts to run and cut out all the virii attachments. It would also mean you couldn't send your favorite family photo to anyone. Hmmmm, think the public would go for that?