more on more on E-mail intercept ruling - good grief!! (fwd from dave at farber.net)

[Dave Emery]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2004 at 10:06:01PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 09:23:08PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> 
> > Amongst the earliers RAMs were tubes of mercury with a pulse-generator
> > at one end and a microphone at the other.  The speed of sound provided
> > the delay, the system required regeneration, like modern DRAMs.
> 
> At GBit WAN stores a whole packet in the fibre as optical delay line, with 10
> GBit
> it's true even for a LAN (some 30 bits/m).
> 
> That interpretation techically allows to wiretap anything.

	You guys miss the point... you don't have to deal with stretched
examples of wires as storage devices ...  I doubt there is a single
router or switch which does not clock incoming packets into various
intermediate storage registers, stuff them temporarily into RAM and/or
FIFOs, and otherwise store traffic.   Nobody builds flow through
asynchronous systems of that complexity, if for no other reason than
that outgoing traffic has to be queued for delivery.

	In fact virtually every networking technology and virtually
every digital telephone technology stores the stream of samples,
packets, vocoder frames and so forth internally for various lengths of
time, often up to many seconds under the right circumstances.

	And essentially every design for a digital interface on the
planet clocks bits one by one into holding flip flops, so viewed at the
nanosecond clock tick by clock tick level the data is sitting there in
storage even for devices that don't store whole packets, frames or
messages.  Shut off the clock and the data will sit there forever
(plus or minus dynamic refresh issues).

	Thus unless the law changes, you are quite right - wiretapping
virtually anything in digital format - at least by copying it from a
storage device such as a latch inside the communications equipment that
properly carries the traffic - is perfectly legal without exception
under this absurd ruling.

-- 
   Dave Emery N1PRE,  die at dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493