J. Michael Diehl <mdiehl@triton.unm.edu> said: According to Mike Godwin:

...

examining the mail that passes through his system, it seems likely that he is violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

That was my first question. Then it occured to me that I have seen bbs's which have disclaimers wrt email privacy. That is the loophole he is exploiting.

I haven't kept up on this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that BBS's had a choice as to whether to operate as Common Carriers or not, as long as they were strictly consistent. If they want to be categorized as Common Carriers then they have to have strict policies of hands-off privacy, are not liable for the content of messages on their board, and the ECPA applies. But if they do not guarantee privacy, do not perform any kind of censorship or other control of message contents, then they are not Common Carriers and the ECPA does not apply. Prodigy would be an example of the former, Internet email & news would be an example of the latter. Yes? No? Is this stale, ancient, and incorrect info? Or if the concept is correct, is the problem that they are merely forwarding email from systems that *are* CC's, and so the ECPA applies to that particular service, whether or not it applies to the rest of what they do? Doug