Xref: utzoo comp.admin.policy:153 comp.unix.admin:2034 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!drivax!braun From: braun@dri.com (Kral) Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy,comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: E-mail Privacy Message-ID: Date: 29 May 91 15:27:01 GMT References: <15110@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <7129@cactus.org> Distribution: na Organization: Digital Research Inc Lines: 27 In article lee@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@dri.com "Talking trash, touching on truth" -- Micheal Hedges