] Authorities charged Councilman with violating the Wiretap
] Act, which governs unauthorized interception of
] communication. But the court found that because the
] e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM,
] of the defendant's computer system when he copied them,
] he did not intercept them while they were in transit over
] wires and therefore did not violate the Wiretap Act.

[ Is this total bullshit, or should they have gone after this guy under a different guise? -k ]

I made a comment about the ECPA yesterday. I'm not sure what the implications of that are here. However, I hadn't paid enough attention to this article at the time. I just read the summary.

Turns out, this IS total bullshit. Its one of those cases again where we are making laws that have to do with how technology is designed rather then how people behave. That is always the wrong approach.

The line between communications "moving" on a wire and communications "stored" in RAM is so gray in modern telecommunications networks that to draw a line between them is to, as one author effectively put it, eviscerate the wiretap law. Data moves in and out of RAM over and over and over again as it moves between point A and point B. As all networks, including the phone network, are digital, there essentially is no more wiretap law at all in any area where this decision is effective or affirmed.

This decision is an absolute nightmare scenario.

E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible