LS: This story certainly appears at first glance to be a case of the court making a mind-numbingly stupid decision. However, the issues here are more subtle than they might first appear. The real issue is not that anyone thinks that email should not have privacy from random third parties, but rather that the law should be read to mean what it actually says. It can well be considered dangerous to allow arbitrary enforcement of laws in line with what they "should" have said, as opposed to what they do say. The best way to fix this is for wiretap privacy laws to be expanded to fit the modern age. Fortunately, if a bill preventing third parties from randomly reading each other's emails were brought before Congress, its hard to imagine that anyone would dare allow the record to show that they voted 'nay', so this situation seems fixable. . . .
E-mail privacy suffered a serious setback on Tuesday when a court of appeals ruled that an e-mail provider did not break the law in reading his customers' communications without their consent.

The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that Bradford C. Councilman did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions.

Councilman, owner of a website selling rare and out-of-print books, offered book-dealer customers e-mail accounts through his site. But unknown to those customers, Councilman installed code that intercepted and copied any e-mail that came to them from his competitor, Amazon.com. Although Councilman did not prevent the mail from reaching recipients, he read thousands of copied messages in order to know what books customers were seeking and gain a commercial advantage over Amazon.

The link for this article located at wired.com is no longer available.