E-mail Privacy

[Kral]

In article <LEE.91May28164840 at meercat.wang.com> lee at wang.com (Lee Story) writes:
>
>Finally someone in this long thread has chosen to comment on the ethical
>issue, and has enough sense to know that the law and the economy do not
>determine ethics...
>Nonetheless, if users have been given the impression, explicitly or
>by implicit convention, that they are using an unmonitored channel of
>communications, it seems unethical to make use of that channel's
>incidental characteristics (e.g., backup copies) for any purpose other
>than such communications.

[I'm not a lawyer, nor am I in the legal profession, so I can't speak
authoritatively on this subject; but I have discussed this at length with our
legal department and our Human Resources dept.]

In this case, at least as far as California is concerned, they are one in the
same.  If you give your employees the impression that email is a private
communication channel, you may get zapped if you fire someone using information
obtained by snooping therein.

(I seem to recall that backups of email played a very large part in the IRAN
CONTRA scandal -- some operator realized that they had copies of all the email
that one of the big whigs [Casey?] had deleted).

-- 
kral * 408/647-6112 *               ...!uunet!drivax!braun * braun at dri.com
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