Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches)
boston.com
boston.com
But that's just a school. The much more important case is whether anyone in the federal government gets punished when they do the same thing without a warrant. So far, it doesn't look like it.
You can be essentially compelled to break the law - and you gain no immunity for being forced. Damned if you don't, convicted if you do.
Under federal law an email provider may not "knowingly divulge" the contents of email "to any governmental entity" without a court order or emergency situation involving "serious physical injury." Violations are punishable by "imprisonment for not more than 1 year" and civil liability.
It's true that there's an exception to the law. That says providers may share the contents of customers' communications only "with the lawful consent" of the user. A federal appeals court in 2003 narrowed that, saying consent exists only when the "party knew about and consented to the interception." And the FTC has said that it's unlawful for a company not "to adequately disclose" it's sharing information.
Translation: if Comcast buried a we-will-disclose-all-your-email-to-the-FBI in the fine print of its terms of service, its executives risk felony charges (and mass defections). In the real world, Comcast doesn't do that -- and it is illegal to hand over your emails without a warrant.
Also, what's the felony statute to which you're referring?
The felony statute I was referring to far above was the Wiretap Act. The "not more than 1 year" in prison is from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Also if you're talking about cable providers you need to look at the Communications Act of 1934 and the Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984. Enjoy. :)
(The resident deans whose email was searched were faculty, not staff employees. The 12 RDs of the Houses are faculty with a lecturer rank: two of them serve on the Faculty Council; Harvard views RDs as faculty when reporting faculty counts; Harvard tells US News and World Report they're full-time faculty, etc.)
But then of course the thread veered into other directions including Google, Qwest, shell corporations, the NSA, the British Parliament, Comcast, etc. As usual!
As you suggest, we rely on 'good taste' from both our employers and our governments.
Is there some way to define good taste, which can be applied in court.. do I have some legal recourse if my government acts in bad taste ?
It seems that the legal system has evolved over the years to be our best attempt to scale and codify the idea of 'good taste'.
As for what one has to do to engage in a private discussion over the internet, any answer involves encryption. Otherwise the question is ridiculous on its face--how can you have a "private discussion" where dozens of intermediaries have access to the plain text of your communication?
Google's stated policy is to fight government requisition of data, but ultimately to comply with the law. That is to say, Google claims to be as anti-government-surveillance as it is possible for a corporation to be. I am aware of no evidence whatsoever that this claim is false. Admittedly, I also have no strong evidence that it's true[0].
Note that I'm not quibbling with the literal truth of your statement, since your statement deals only in hypotheticals. But it'd be pretty crass of me to say something like "I've never seen <insert name here> rape a child without offering the kid some heroin to ease the pain", even though it's technically true for every name including yours.
Also note that I'm not entirely sunshine-and-roses positive about Google's record on privacy. I think it's not as bad as the fear-mongers state, but not without any concerns whatsoever. Google management, it seems to me, pretends to believe that when users say "we want privacy" they always-and-only mean "we want privacy from the government and criminals". Which is... disingenuous. But I think that Google appears to be a relatively pro-privacy [1] organization, especially with regard to the particular slur you raised, and I've never seen a credible argument that this appearance is false.
[0] I do see some evidence that Google is truly anti-surveillance. However, all the evidence I have is also consistent with the theory that Google is willing to spend a lot of money to convince its employees that it's anti-surveillance... if Google were an NSA shell corp, maybe this is how it would behave.
[1] By "relatively pro-privacy", I mean I have to think pretty hard to think of organizations MORE pro-privacy, although eventually I remembered that mozilla exists.
Google fought a DOJ subpoena for search terms in court (while Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft did not), which I wrote about here: http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What-does-the-Google-subpoena-mean/...
It also nationalized Warshak by requiring a search warrant for the contents of archived email (anyone think Verizon/AT&T/etc. have been doing that?). More importantly, Google is currently challenging a secret NSL it received from the FBI in federal court in San Francisco, making it the first large Internet company to do so. It also became the first large Internet company to divulge summary statistics about receiving NSLs.
Twitter and Amazon.com have similarly good records. And Facebook fought a subpoena from the state of Virginia.
He didn't make any claims about Google at all other than implying they might be recipients of requests, so how in the world was that a slur against Google?
I didn't say they did. I said: "the federal government [has asked] Google to voluntarily hand over your e-mails." I referenced Google because of: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/13753-gov-t-requests-google-....
Also the good folks at CNSNews.com (published by the conservative advocacy group Media Research Center) would probably not be my first choice for a survey of surveillance and electronic privacy law. For instance the article fails to mention that, at the time it was published, Google required search warrants for all e-mail -- an important detail.
Under the Wiretap Act, an FBI agent who "procures any other person to intercept" or "endeavors to intercept" e-mail without a court order is guilty of a federal felony.
In addition, an email provider may not "knowingly divulge" the contents of email "to any governmental entity" without a court order or emergency situation involving "serious physical injury." Violations are punishable by "imprisonment for not more than 1 year."
These criminal sanctions are one reason why AT&T and other companies that opened their networks to the NSA were so desperate for retroactive legal immunity (especially after the EFF et al. lawsuit). Which Congress dutifully provided.
Not in countries that care about the rights to privacy of their citizens. Where I live, the company can only look at the contents of email I send from my work account if the subject reasonably appears to be about work. If the subject is obviously personal, they can't legally read it.
Americans need to start standing up for their rights instead of having their rights dictated by what ever is most convenient for the corporation.
Whereas an institution MIGHT be able to justify such egregious violations of privacy, a government can have no such moral quandaries because of the exacting detail of our laws; and yet, here we are.
Steal a little and they call you a thief. Steal a lot and they call you King.
That being said, I wasn't trying to draw a direct comparison, and I realize that an employment contract has nothing to do with the constitution. My point was that someone lost their job while holding themselves to the standards of an employment contract which one would assume would be more lenient than our constitution (and in my reading it is but that's a topic for another day).
In short, I agree with your point but I think it's tangential to mine.
The circle back on topic: there is nothing within the worldview of the Constitution that is inconsistent with a certain activities being allowed of the government that are outside the powers of an individual. You can argue about which entity is the right one to exercise it, but the government is supposed to have more expansive powers than any person.
Dean Hammonds is a woman.
You do realize of course that most people in the world would give a testicle, a breast (or two) to be affiliated with that University, right?
If you are going to act behind someone's back without telling him, you had better go to the police rather than perform this kind of 'paralegal investigation'.