At 02:47 PM 7/6/04 -0700, Hal Finney wrote:

...

Messages in storage have much lower judicial protection than messages in transit. (This does not have much technical merit, in the current atmosphere of "damn the laws - there are terrorists around the corner", but can be seen as a nice little potential benefit.)

Ie zero.

One thing I haven't understood in all the commentary is whether law enforcment still needs a warrant to access emails stored in this way. Apparently the ISP can read them without any notice or liability, but what about the police?

You are state meat, whether 5150'd or not.

Also, what if you run your own mail spool, so the email is never stored

at the ISP, it just passes through the routers controlled by the ISP (just like it passed through a dozen other routers on the internet). Does this give the ISP (and all the other router owners) the right to read your email? I don't think so, it seems like that would definitely

cross over the line from "mail in storage" to "mail in transit".

If you think the cable landings in Va/Md are coincidental, you are smoking something I've run out of. Its all recorded. I'm sure the archiving and database groups in Ft. Meade will get a chuckle out of your "the right to" idioms.