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Posted by Frank Slootweg on July 16, 2005, 10:17 am
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[I took the liberty to add comp.mail.misc because the subject matter may
also be of interest to the audience of that group. When responding, feel
free to set Followup-To: either group as I am subscribed to both.]
> Someone brought up the idea of gov't monitoring of e-mail. I'm not a tech,
> but clearly to do this, they'd have to be in the transmission chain
> somewhere. Is this done or is it just an urban legend? Can ISP's be
> compelled to allow a government agency to tap in to their system, and do so
> without warning to the users of the ISP?
>
> Another way I suppose would be an unscrupulous employee at an ISP. Any
> documented cases of this happening?
"a governement" is rather broad. I assume you live in the US, so this
may not (yet) be relevant, but the European Union (EU) countries are
contemplating archiving e-mail (and web and phone) "traffic data". What
"traffic data" is exactly, nobody knows, *including* the involved
governements :-(, but for e-mail it will probably include 'who' sent a
message to 'whom' with which Subject: at which date/time. I put "who[m]"
in quotes, because the concept of a sender and recipient *person*
doesn't really exist in e-mail.
Besides this archiving of e-mail (and other) "traffic data", the Dutch
governement is about to implement a "telephone directory" for Internet,
which tries to tie IP addresses and e-mail addresses to people. The
Internet professionals (association) in our country have explained that
that can't be done, but wanting the impossible never stopped any
governement, did it? :-( However with the recent events in London, I'm
afraid this is going to happen, whether it actually helps or not and
despite the cost.
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