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Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

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Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#41

Post by declan »

tptacek wrote: post #40
declan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another area where your intuition might say A but in reality the law is !A. Under federal law an email provider may not "knowingly divulge" the contents of email "to any governmental entity" without a court order or emergency situation involving "serious physical injury." Violations are punishable by "imprisonment for not more than 1 year" and civil liability. It's true that there's an exception to the law. T…

Employers can share email messages without any consent. IT operators do not face felony charges for establishing that term. Where is the line drawn? Where do companies cease to have the freedom to establish their own contracts with their users? Also, what's the felony statute to which you're referring?

Sure, if we're talking about employers, the rules are different. But most of the discussion in this thread has been about non-employer email providers. The line is actually drawn pretty reasonably in that case, if you spend some time thinking about it.

The felony statute I was referring to far above was the Wiretap Act. The "not more than 1 year" in prison is from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Also if you're talking about cable providers you need to look at the Communications Act of 1934 and the Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984. Enjoy. :)

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#42

Post by tptacek »

declan wrote: post #41
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers can share email messages without any consent. IT operators do not face felony charges for establishing that term. Where is the line drawn? Where do companies cease to have the freedom to establish their own contracts with their users? Also, what's the felony statute to which you're referring?

Sure, if we're talking about employers, the rules are different. But most of the discussion in this thread has been about non-employer email providers. The line is actually drawn pretty reasonably in that case, if you spend some time thinking about it. The felony statute I was referring to far above was the Wiretap Act. The "not more than 1 year" in prison is from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Al…

You're on a thread talking about employers searching mail, Declan.

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#43

Post by declan »

tptacek wrote: post #42
declan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if we're talking about employers, the rules are different. But most of the discussion in this thread has been about non-employer email providers. The line is actually drawn pretty reasonably in that case, if you spend some time thinking about it. The felony statute I was referring to far above was the Wiretap Act. The "not more than 1 year" in prison is from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Al…

You're on a thread talking about employers searching mail, Declan.

Actually this thread was not about routine employer-employee searches, but Harvard College and faculty email searches. Harvard is as far as I can tell unique in providing its faculty -- thanks to a very able computer science professor there -- with contractual privacy rights that go above and beyond the rights any other university or employer provides.

(The resident deans whose email was searched were faculty, not staff employees. The 12 RDs of the Houses are faculty with a lecturer rank: two of them serve on the Faculty Council; Harvard views RDs as faculty when reporting faculty counts; Harvard tells US News and World Report they're full-time faculty, etc.)

But then of course the thread veered into other directions including Google, Qwest, shell corporations, the NSA, the British Parliament, Comcast, etc. As usual!

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#44

Post by pfortuny »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #18
jtchang wrote: post #17

I'm confused. Isn't it perfectly legal for the institution to search your e-mail records? I know when you work at a company generally the company can monitor everything you do (including e-mail).

Just because you didn't do anything illegal doesn't mean you deserve to keep your post as a leader of an institution after you've lost a large part of the organization's trust.

Exactly, even more in an institution in which 'trust' and 'honesty' should be the basis of behaviour ('Veritas', you can read that on the coat of arms of Harvard...).

If you are going to act behind someone's back without telling him, you had better go to the police rather than perform this kind of 'paralegal investigation'.

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#45

Post by vidarh »

declan wrote: post #30
jholman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My apologies for changing the subject, but do you have any evidence at all that Google has ever "voluntarily hand[ed] over [anyone's] e-mails", or was that just a random slur? Google's stated policy is to fight government requisition of data, but ultimately to comply with the law. That is to say, Google claims to be as anti-government-surveillance as it is possible for a corporation to be. I am aware of no evidence w…

Random slur. Google fought a DOJ subpoena for search terms in court (while Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft did not), which I wrote about here: http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What-does-the-Google-subpoena-mean/... It also nationalized Warshak by requiring a search warrant for the contents of archived email (anyone think Verizon/AT&T/etc. have been doing that?). More importantly, Google is currently challenging a secret NSL it rec…

> Random slur.

He didn't make any claims about Google at all other than implying they might be recipients of requests, so how in the world was that a slur against Google?

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#46

Post by rayiner »

declan wrote: post #38
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should probably have used "definitely unconstitutional" since I was talking about the constitutional aspect, but in any case the Wiretap Act does not protect e-mail older than 180 days: https://www.cdt.org/issue/wiretap-ecpa .

Re: the Wiretap Act, you're quite right. But fortunately the Fourth Amendment does: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025650-281.html

Only in the sixth circuit (Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee).

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#47

Post by declan »

rayiner wrote: post #46
declan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: the Wiretap Act, you're quite right. But fortunately the Fourth Amendment does: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025650-281.html

Only in the sixth circuit (Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee).

Except that (from memory) Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo treat it as the law of the land for all U.S. users. And based on the DOJ's twin appearances before congressional committees in the last few months, they're not arguing.

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#48

Post by flyinRyan »

rayiner wrote: post #7
dripton wrote: post #2

Glad to see that she's being forced to step down after such an egregious invasion of privacy. But that's just a school. The much more important case is whether anyone in the federal government gets punished when they do the same thing without a warrant. So far, it doesn't look like it.

The Dean of Harvard is stepping down not because there is anything illegal about her searching through the e-mails of faculty (your employer has every right to search your work e-mail), but because it was in bad taste in an academic institution which made the Dean ineffective as a figurehead. Similarly, there is nothing definitively illegal about the federal government asking Google to voluntarily hand over your e-ma…

>your employer has every right to search your work e-mail

Not in countries that care about the rights to privacy of their citizens. Where I live, the company can only look at the contents of email I send from my work account if the subject reasonably appears to be about work. If the subject is obviously personal, they can't legally read it.

Americans need to start standing up for their rights instead of having their rights dictated by what ever is most convenient for the corporation.

Re: Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)

#49

Post by flyinRyan »

vidarh wrote: post #45
declan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random slur. Google fought a DOJ subpoena for search terms in court (while Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft did not), which I wrote about here: http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What-does-the-Google-subpoena-mean/... It also nationalized Warshak by requiring a search warrant for the contents of archived email (anyone think Verizon/AT&T/etc. have been doing that?). More importantly, Google is currently challenging a secret NSL it rec…

> Random slur. He didn't make any claims about Google at all other than implying they might be recipients of requests, so how in the world was that a slur against Google?

In the eyes of fanboys, anything that isn't praise is a slur.
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