At 8:02 PM 2/2/96, Timothy C. May wrote:

*Universities, corporations, and even ISPs are explicitly adopting policies that allow them to inspect e-mail at will. (If the arrangement is made in advance, it may not violate the ECPA to do this...and I'm not saying there aren't some good reasons why these entities would want the right to inspect e-mail (their liability being a good example), just noting the growing situation.

On that note... A good friend of mine was fired (forced to resign) from her Wall Street programming job recently. The reason: her employer "just happened" to stumble onto a message she'd posted to a mailing list a year ago, in which she'd said some "very unflattering" things about the company. The message in question was posted from her personal email account (so it in no way violated the company's rather strict internet use policy) and was the only such message she'd ever posted. However, one other piece of email was cited, this one also containing an unflattering reference to the company but never mentioning them by name. The obvious conclusion is that they hadn't merely come across this stuff in an innocent Alta Vista search for "Company Name," but rather had searched for my friend's name specifically. My friend is looking into various legal options, so she's asked me not to say any more for now. But I consider this a very serious development and a frightening precedent. The company in question, incidentally, also does routine scans of email and archives all incoming and outgoing mail. As I and others have been saying for a while: what's happening on the net is another "enclosures" movement. Yes, I know that on this list that's a politically incorrect view. Deal with it. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dmandl@panix.com http://www.wfmu.org/~davem