Congress should slam the door on e-mail snoops

Mississippi Sun Herald | July 13 2004

In the frantic race that seems to be setting the pace for the 21st century, common sense is being edged out by modern technology, and personal privacy has been left at the back of the pack.

It's not news that your e-mail is not "real" mail as handled by the U.S. Postal Service and has never been protected by the law that guards your mail from tampering. However, it may come as a shock to learn that a federal appeals court in Boston has ruled that your e-mail correspondence is not protected by the law that guards your telephone lines from wiretapping.

The ruling was based, quite literally, on a technicality. Because e-mail messages are technically "stored" by a customer's Internet service provider, even if for only a fraction of a second, they are not subject to the federal laws that prohibit eavesdropping on telephone lines. The messages may, in fact, be claimed as property and used by the e-mail provider.

One small Internet service carrier used e-mails between its customers and a retail competitor to develop marketing strategies. A larger company is scanning messages to target Internet advertising.

If messages are not protected from the carrier's scrutiny, who else might demand a look? It's hardly Big Brother paranoia when one realizes that last week the Chinese government began to censor the text messages sent between China's 300 million cell phone users. Like e-mail correspondence, cell phone conversations cross national and political boundaries.

If this ruling is allowed to stand, Congress should quickly retool the wiretap law to cover the loophole created by Internet technology. Individuals and businesses must be assured of a basic level of privacy in this now-basic mode of communication.