Joel, I am actually glad that all of this came out because it confirms what I have said all along about Jonese--he is as dirty as they come! He has no intention of enforcing the law, except for buddies!!!
Joel,
You may assume that email is a private, one-to-one conversation safe from prying eyes, but email is about as confidential yelling into a megaphone in the town square. Your messages can be intercepted and read anywhere in transit, or reconstructed and read off of backup devices without tripping legal rights.
If you're sending email at work, your boss can legally monitor it, and if your company becomes involved in a lawsuit, your adversary has the legal right to review it. If you send email from home, anonymous hackers can intercept it, and if you are suspected of a crime, law enforcement officials with a warrant can seize your electronic correspondence. Even your Internet service provider may legally be able to scrutinize your email.
What all this amounts to is simple: Unless you encrypt your messages don't count on email as a confidential method of transmitting information.
The law in this area is in its infancy and we are clearly playing catch-up with issues of privacy, piracy and the like. Bottom line, there is no privacy rights yet with email sent from your home computer, even if it is sent to law enforcement, officers of the court, or your own private attorney.
Anyone else notice there seems to be a bunch of recently deleted threads on the "other" site? The latest post (1/7/10) refers to this thread but it is not in date sequence so you have to drill down to find.
