A U.S. federal appeals court says there is no protection of privacy for e-mail as it passes through an ISP's servers.
“This is one of the worst and most dangerous court decisions ever to appear relating to the Internet,” says Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility.
Here's the first two grafs from a Washington Post story on the subject:
A company that provides e-mail service has the right to copy and read any message bound for its customers, a federal appeals court panel has ruled in a decision that could expand e-mail monitoring by businesses and the government.A company that provides e-mail service has the right to copy and read any message bound for its customers, a federal appeals court panel has ruled in a decision that could expand e-mail monitoring by businesses and the government.
The 2-to-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in Massachusetts alarmed privacy advocates, who said it torpedoes any notion that e-mail enjoys the same protections as telephone conversations, or letters when they are sorted by mail carriers.
Weinstein continues: “It is impossible to overstate the potential significance of this astoundingly poor decision.”