Rehabilitacion Fachadas

The DMCA has been upheld many times under far flimsier reasoning. I would suggest that Mr. Rehberg sue for damages under the DMCA.

The precedent I’m writing about is V-mail. In WWII, mail to and from servicemen was photo-copied onto microfilm, and reprinted at the destination. This was necessary to reduce the volume being transmitted back and forth. The microfilms held the same functions as copies of e-mail stored on ISP mail servers. And these microfilms were considered to be fully protected by the 4th Amendment. In short, access to those copies could only be authorized by a legal warrant. I will note that the mail was censored prior to photocopying; but that falls under the category of a reasonable search and seizure of specific information during wartime.

For the rest of us the Question should be: “Copies of my email!? What ‘copies’!?” [IF my email goes to somebody's Inbox and THEY make copies [for file or forwarding], that is one thing. IF I make and retain file copies in my SentMail or other files, that is another thing. IF every hub/ISP/server that my email goes THROUGH makes and retains copies of my email [AND they don't tell ME], that is a whole ‘nother thing. That would seem to be e-theft of e-information which would fall straight into the ‘none-of-your-business’ class.]

On another point, is my [incoming] email ‘delivered’ when it hits my Inbox or is it ‘delivered’ if-and-when I Open it?

On a final point, what would be the legal effects/protection IF I were to decide to Copyright ALL my e-publications [including ALL my e-mail]? IF I claim to be an e-Publisher or an e-Reporter, would ALL my ‘work product’ be covered under First Amendment [to the Constitution for the United States], as well as by Fourth Amendment?

Physical mail, email, telephone calls and telegraphs all have things in common which provide for protections under the Constitution, but it is necessary for us to home in on the DIFFERENCES between them, and insure that those differences do not preclude the rights and privileges of citizens under the Constitution, simply because of a failure in comparing them with one-to-one correspondence; we should not curtail said privileges because some simple analogy between them fails.

In point, the findings seem to be based on the concept of ‘delivery’, and this point makes the findings incorrect: ‘delivery’ isn’t applicable to both email and physical mail the same way.

The basis of physical mail ‘delivery’ is obvious, but in email, there is no ‘delivery’ involved, especially in the case of ‘web mail, where the recipient is given a copy of the original document– he never actually RECEIVES the document the way physical mail is ‘delivered’.

One possible exception to this comes to mind: back in the ‘olden days’, before (almost)everyone was using ‘web-mail’ services, email was actually ‘downloaded’ to the recipient’s computer, and was immediately ‘gone’ from the server. With web mail, the document remains on the server indefinately, allowing the recipient to ‘view’ (not be delivered-to) the document at other times, from other computers.This difference proves a point… that analogies fail, as does this one, on the surface, because technologically, there’s little difference between email and web mail, EXCEPT in the eyes of the beholder, that’d be us.

The courts need to embrace new technologies with their individualities, and understand how they are Constitutionally compliant, rather than simply discard our rights because two technologies are not precisely the same in all aspects. thanks fer lis’nin seekertom

I agree that this is a persuasive argument for encrypting your email. Even if there is no reasonable expectation that a copy of a cleartext email is private, the same standard wouldn’t apply to an encrypted email. Once it’s encrypted, the ISP can’t decrypt it without running afoul of items such as the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rule as well as computer fraud and abuse laws, so the expectation of privacy is more reasonable.

Plus, there’s a fair chance the authorities would have some trouble decrypting it even if they did obtain it.

The downside is that certain segments of law enforcement seem to regard the mere act of encrypting an email as evidence of criminal or even terrorist intent.

Glenn Logan:Just like regular mail, email communications are packaged in an “envelope” that, while it is possible to read en-route, it is not really designed to be read en-route.The analogous snail-mail equivalent would be holding the mail to the light to divine its contents.The person sending the email intends it for a specific place, and absent intentional intervention on the part of the owners of the intervening computers, the mail is not sent in human-readable format — it gets that way when the intended user accesses his mailbox with software designed for reading its contents.

Except that this is wrong. The mail is sent in human readable format. The SMTP protocol basically looks like this:

From: somebody@somewhere.com
To: recipient@somewhere-else.com
Subject: This message is not private

Here is the body of the message that can be read in any text editor. It's plain text, not some format that requires "software designed for reading its contents."


I don’t know anything about the law in this matter, but if postcards are protected while traveling through the postal service, then email should be protected too. Otherwise, they should not. People should encrypt their email if they want/need any level of privacy.

On the first hand, it’d be analogous to raiding someone’s P.O. Box or private party mail drop — you’re paying the third party to get your mail to you and send it out for you, and thus have a reasonable expectation that they won’t share it with all the world, otherwise you wouldn’t be paying them. What happens when you stop paying them is spelled out in your rental agreement — generally they bounce all your mail back to the sender, or shred it.

On the second hand, it’s closer to raiding someone’s storage unit to get the mail they’ve stored there. Again, you’re paying the third party to look after your stuff, and have specific consequences spelled out for when you stop paying — with the ISP, they’ll delete all your files after a specified period, and the storage unit operator will sell all your stuff to the highest bidder a few months after you stop paying.

I’m not sure about the P.O. Box, but the storage unit seems to require a warrant to search it.

If you stop paying, I’m pretty sure your rights with regard to search and seizure on your stuff get shakey, and once they open it up for auction they go away entirely. While you’re still paying rent you have a reasonable expectation that the landlord won’t open up your files/house/storage unit for the police without a warrant.

If that’s not the case, this is an evil precedent.

Howard Gilbert: When you send E-Mail, you first transmit the message to the mail transfer agent machine of your own ISP. It is then transmitted through a potential series of mail transfer agents before it arrives at the agent of the ISP of the addressee. It is then transferred to a “postoffice” server machine that holds it until it is read by the E-Mail program of the addressee. At every step along the way at least the header of the message is read by the agents.[In most cases there will not be an intermediate SMTP agent, but the protocol doesn’t guarantee this.]Meanwhile, several layers down in the protocol, communication between any two machines (clients/agents/postoffice) is handled over IP. Packets of data representing part or all of the message are transmitted through ISPs based on their destination IP address.There is no way to anticipate the route an IP packet will take. It depends on the routes advertised to each ISP by the adjacent ISPs. Most of this depends on good faith. If the ISP in Sicily has a message for a network belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and the ISP that is advertising the best route to that network is the one in Tel Aviv, then it sends the message through Israel because that appears to be the shortest route. Meanwhile neither the sender nor the receiver knows how the message was routed.If I give a postcard to a postman, I have some reasonable expectation that it will be delivered by the USPS. However, if I give a post card to some kid on a bicycle, and tell him to go to the middle of town and give it to the first person he sees going in the right direction of the intended addressee, with no expectation of who will be asked to forward the card or even how many people will be involved in its delivery, do I have any reasonable expectation that nobody along the way will look down and read its contents? Does this change if there is a copier on every corner and each kid with a bicycle makes a copy of each message he carries?There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in E-Mail unless you encrypt the contents. Of course, “reasonable expectation” is a term of art that courts can translate into “sufficiency widespread irrational expectation based on complete ignorance of technology”.

The use of encryption would, in my opinion, be prima facia evidence of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” argument underpinning the abrogation of that right by the ISP on behalf of the subscriber.
————

“I am not me. This is someone else.”

~Dave

Glenn Logan: I think the court misunderstands that the fact it is possible to read en-route electronic mail means that it is sitting there in plain text for all to see.That is not true at all — one must use “special” software to convert that message into a readable format.We think of emails sent as “plain text” as being the same thing as typed words on a page, but they aren’t — they are still bits and bytes, and are transmitted as such.They cannot be read unless “opened” by client software — much like any piece of regular mail can be opened with a letter opener, and the fact that everyone has one does not entitle you to use it on other people’s mail, nor convert the mail of others into de-facto “post cards.”

This is the most sensible and relevant point: all information handled by computers or telecomms systems is ‘encrypted’, there is no such thing as ‘plain text’. All information in the real world, eg symbols of the alphabet etc is encoded into appropriate ‘symbols’ used by the different systems at different times, eg quantized voltage levels, magnetic flux levels, frequencies or phases etc etc. By having the appropriate (set of) code tables it is possible to convert this information back into a real world set of symbols, the alphabet, numbers etc etc; there are no real “0′s” & “1′s” in the machines, these are just mappings provided you have the right decryption codes! Of course computers make this easy but it still needs the correct set of encryption/decryption code tables to do the conversion and if I don’t tell you which set of encryption/decryption tables have been used it is supposition that the ‘clear text’ you think you can read on the screen is the same as the original input. Hence anyone who “reads” the information whilst in transit is: a) using special tools to decrypt it; and b) making a guess which would require appropriate weight to be applied to it, ie it’s not ‘fact’ and would have to be treated as such surely in any legal proceedings.

As such I see no reason for him to have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

That’s pretty broad. Even if you can’t call an email a “paper”, it’s surely an “effect”. So US citizens presumably have a right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure of them and so on. Any interpretation of layers of law should keep this basic fact in mind. Put too many layers of doctrine over top of that, trying to base definitions on the minutiae of what was deemed appropriate for communications in a different format, makes it easy to come up with loopholes if loopholes are desired. Expectation of privacy in particular is a fragile thing–all one needs to do is change things so that nobody can reasonably expect privacy, and it becomes legal to invade it.

It seems fairly clear that the court simply didn’t want fourth amendment rights to apply in an effective way to email; given that, it was not hard to come up with a rationale or loophole that arranged for them not to apply. Challenging the details of legal reasoning is a good thing I suppose, but other courts will only take up the logic of such challenges if they are already disposed to feel that fourth amendment rights should be taken seriously.

JMA: I think the fact that email originated with a rather closed cult of geeks has had a very negative effect on whether or not one can or should expect privacy with regard to the contents of electronic correspondence. Just because nerds in general are a paranoid lot does NOT mean the rest of the good, upstanding people of this world should have to put up with their (ridiculous) rules for what is and is not private. If email servers work in such a way as to expose users to this sort of theft and deprive them of legal protection for correspondence, that’s a *bug* — not a feature.This, by the way, is one of the things that still bugs me most about cloud computing. :(

What rules are you referring to?

Why are you fixated on the technology? The government, through legal process, compelled the ISP to give them the messages; it did not obtain the emails by exploiting some technical flaw in the ISP’s servers. This is a legal/social issue, not an issue with email server security.

If you want to protect your electronic privacy, use encryption.