From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 08:21:12 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Corporate e-mail policy
Message-ID: <ae2ba0d5030210046128@[205.199.118.202]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 5:34 PM 8/5/96, James C. Sewell wrote:

>  Personally I think I would approach it as the privacy we have with the
>eontents of our car's trunk.  If an officer has probable cause to search
>the trunk then he can, otherwise he can't.  It's not a perfect system but
>it does work better than other alternatives I can think of.

This comparison breaks down completely. The police are not involved, so the
language of "probable cause" is inappropriate. We may differ in our
opinions on whether employers can search mail and car trunks, but the
language of "probable cause" suggests a legal/constitutional issue that is
probably not there.

Imagine Alice operates a courier service and owns and operates several
delievery vehicles . Bob, her employee, drives one of her cars. Is he to
imagine that the trunk may not be opened by Alice unless she has "probable
cause"? Nonsense. It it _her_ car, bought and paid for. To imagine
otherwise is to wander into a fever swamp in which owners of property may
not even use their own propery.

(If anyone suggests that landlords cannot barge into tenant's apartments,
this is a different situation. For one thing, there are usually terms and
conditions spelled out in a contract about when and under what
circumstances a landlord may enter the premises.)

Is corporate e-mail more like the courier service example or more like the
landlord-tenant example? I suggest the former, as the e-mail is used in the
everyday furtherance of business, and illegality/abuse may harm the owner,
as with drugs in the trunk of a courier car. (The owner of a property who
leases it out is generally not held liable for the misdeeds and crimes of
his tenants, except in some special circumstances. Hotel owners are not
guilty of the crimes of the residents, which are of course common.)

The original question asker, who asked how to help write his corporate
e-mail policy, is free to lobby for a different interpretation; this is,
after all, a matter of agreed-upon policy, not a matter for the state to
stick its nose into.

--Tim May


P.S.

>  Just remember, as was said, once you make a policy it becomes precedence
>and will stick with you forever... longer if it's a bad one.
>

Alice the Courier Service is of course perfectly free to announce new
policies, so your point is incorrect.

--Tim

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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