At 5:34 PM 8/5/96, James C. Sewell wrote:
Personally I think I would approach it as the privacy we have with the eontents of our car's trunk. If an officer has probable cause to search the trunk then he can, otherwise he can't. It's not a perfect system but it does work better than other alternatives I can think of.
This comparison breaks down completely. The police are not involved, so the language of "probable cause" is inappropriate. We may differ in our opinions on whether employers can search mail and car trunks, but the language of "probable cause" suggests a legal/constitutional issue that is probably not there. Imagine Alice operates a courier service and owns and operates several delievery vehicles . Bob, her employee, drives one of her cars. Is he to imagine that the trunk may not be opened by Alice unless she has "probable cause"? Nonsense. It it _her_ car, bought and paid for. To imagine otherwise is to wander into a fever swamp in which owners of property may not even use their own propery. (If anyone suggests that landlords cannot barge into tenant's apartments, this is a different situation. For one thing, there are usually terms and conditions spelled out in a contract about when and under what circumstances a landlord may enter the premises.) Is corporate e-mail more like the courier service example or more like the landlord-tenant example? I suggest the former, as the e-mail is used in the everyday furtherance of business, and illegality/abuse may harm the owner, as with drugs in the trunk of a courier car. (The owner of a property who leases it out is generally not held liable for the misdeeds and crimes of his tenants, except in some special circumstances. Hotel owners are not guilty of the crimes of the residents, which are of course common.) The original question asker, who asked how to help write his corporate e-mail policy, is free to lobby for a different interpretation; this is, after all, a matter of agreed-upon policy, not a matter for the state to stick its nose into. --Tim May P.S.
Just remember, as was said, once you make a policy it becomes precedence and will stick with you forever... longer if it's a bad one.
Alice the Courier Service is of course perfectly free to announce new policies, so your point is incorrect. --Tim Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."