TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Appeals Court Ruling Revives Case of Intercepted E-Mail

Appeals Court Ruling Revives Case of Intercepted E-Mail

Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:46:27 -0400

Businessman can be tried under wiretap statute

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

A federal appeals court in Boston said yesterday that a businessman
charged with intercepting and reading his customers' e-mails can be
tried under a federal wiretapping statute. The ruling is the latest
twist in a four-year-old case that has been closely watched by
Internet civil liberties groups around the country.

Bradford Councilman is former vice president of Interloc Inc., a rare
book dealer in Greenfield that offered a free e-mail service to
customers. In 1998, Councilman allegedly began intercepting any
e-mails sent to his customers by the Internet retailer Amazon.com.
Councilman and his colleagues allegedly read the messages to see what
Amazon was offering his customers, so that he could make attractive
counter-offers.

A grand jury indicted Councilman in 2001 for violating the federal
wiretapping law. Councilman urged dismissal of the indictment, saying
that the wiretap law did not apply because the e-mail was intercepted
while it was stored in the memory of a computer, not when it was
traveling across a network.

A federal district court agreed and threw out the indictment. The US
Justice Department, which had brought the case against Councilman,
appealed the ruling. But a three-judge panel of the US Court of
Appeals in Boston also rejected the charges. Last year, the Justice
Department persuaded all seven appeals court judges to hear the case.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2005/08/12/appeals_court_ruling_revives_case_of_intercepted_e_mail/

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