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From: root@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Congress is now debating the future of Usenet
Message-ID: <5615@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Tue, 26-Aug-86 01:51:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.5615
Posted: Tue Aug 26 01:51:36 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Aug-86 02:59:56 EDT
References: <1632@well.UUCP> <1013@hoptoad.uucp> <15341@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 46

One of the interesting issues is how the proposed changes would affect
mail within our campus.  Currently we have what I regard as a
reasonable privacy policy.  Users' files will not be divulged to
anyone else unless there is a good reason for doing so.  However good
reasons can include University proceedings, and investigations by the
system administrators involving resource usage or system security.  I
am hoping that nothing in the law will require me to get a court order
to look at mail files on my own system, should I have a good reason
for doing so.  (Note that this is not something that I do under normal
circumstances.  But if I have probable cause to think that a user is
doing something damaging, and that looking at their mail file will
show it, I do not want to have to go to the police in order to proceed
with an investigation.  It should be possible to authorize this by an
internal administrative proceeding of some sort. In general we try to
avoid bringing down even the campus police on our students, except in
really extreme cases.)

It is not clear to me exactly what is protected.  Most people seem to
think that mail in transit through my site is protected.  But once
mail gets into the user's files, is it still protected?  I am hoping
that it is not.  Otherwise we will have to have special flags in each
byte to indicate whether the byte arrived via computer mail or not.

It is also not clear to me that everything that is called electronic
mail really is, according to the law.  The law clearly has in view
third parties providing a service to the public.  Presumably it should
still be possible for a company to route its memos among its staff
electronically, without suddenly finding that it can't look at its own
memos if the right person doesn't happen to be around to authorize it.
I suspect that our lawyers will take the position that we are not
providing general electronic mail service to our students.  Rather, we
are providing simplified ways for them to receive and turn in
assignments, etc.  I.e. they are using our computer only for what is
broadly considered University business.  They are not end users in
the same sense as a user of a public timesharing system.

If the term "public" turns out to have a crucial role, as I suspect it
will, we are likely to find ourselves in the same situation as with
our campus roads.  Once a year we close all of our roads, just to
prove to people that these are strictly internal University resources,
and not a public road.  I think we may want to take the view that we
have an agreement with a few neighboring sites to exchange data via
UUCP, but we are not provding an electronic mail service to the
public.  Once a year we may decide to bounce all communications for a
day, just to make it clear that we are not in the mail business.  Does
this make any sense to anybody?