The emails we send on the Internet are wide open, not encrypted unless we encrypt them. They pause momentarily on their way from mail server to mail server to your inbox.

People have the expectation that their email is private, that information in them is not going to be read by anyone other than the person it's sent to. In practice, law enforcement needs a wiretap order to look at someone's email. The owner of the email server could legally read subscriber email, but most have privacy policies and service agreements that say they won't.

But the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that because email is briefly stored, it's not protected the same way as conversations or letters. That it was okay for a now defunct email service to copy subscribers' emails so it could go through them, The government alleged the company was reading subscribers email to its rival, Amazon.com, to try to better compete against the giant.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, say the decision puts all of our electronic communications in jeopardy, anything electronic. "The decision exposes that our laws provide inadequate protection against ISPs' use of their customers' email for their own business purposes and without notice or consent."

Will this decision prompt the big providers to start looking at our mail? Probably not. While spam filters look at our email "electronically" to help decide what gets bounced and what goes through, the big Internet service providers say they have no interest in reading our emails.

EPIC, The Electronic Privacy Information Center, calls the court ruling "aberrant," but if the ruling were applied nationally, a lot of people who routinely use email - would stop. "If email does not enjoy this protection from government and private surveillance, it can no longer be used in a lot of contexts. People will stop using email."

EPIC says wiretap laws must be updated to reflect our electronic world.

Comment

The Appeals Court ruling likely will be appealed. And while privacy advocates criticize the decision, they also say it will elevate the conversation about privacy, make more Internet users aware of how "open" the Internet is, and perhaps legislation to help the law catch up with technology.

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