The search for the leaker of thousands of private emails, used to harass and impugn the reputation of the world’s top climatolohiusts, is narrowing down. Dare we dream a suspsct soon emerges to Ollie North fanfare levels? They seem to want to be caught, even leaving a taunting note in the database:
(SideneyHerald) — The stunt was enough to jump-start a police investigation that had long seemed dormant. In December, citing a request from British law enforcement, the US Justice Department asked that Automattic, the parent company of the blog host WordPress.com, preserve three days of digital logs for three blogs where the links to the latest emails first appeared.In a raid in Leeds, Britain, the police also confiscated laptops from the home of one blogger; he says the police have told him he is not a suspect.
Personally, I think all emails everywhere should be public. Total transparency, 100%, for everyone, serves both science and democracy best. I don’t write anything via email I’m the least bit worried about and just assume it’s all being read, at least by a machine looking for keywords anyway, if not an actual nosy person at the NSA or God knows where.
Note: BTW folks, I hope to get back to a more regular blogging schedule about the middle of this week. I work in tech support/customer service, it’s been brutal the last coule of weeks.
I’m curious do you single out emails or should all person to person communications be public and how far are you willng to go?
I’m not sure if I want my emails publicly accessible. I value my privacy. Traceability is fine with me. In many countries there are already laws in place that (at least in the business world) every email has to be stored in a tamper-proof way for varying periods of time. This seems ok for me in case any legal disputes arise. But I tend to think that my emails are nobody’s business even if I have nothing to hide.
“I think all emails everywhere should be public”
Sarcasm? Shouldn’t then general mail everywhere be public by the same merits? I would think for the same reasons as regalar mail that email should be private, and opening someone else’s would be an offense. Not that anyone could police that, but still. Have the law on paper and when hackers are caught there’s a conviction attached to reading and releasing private emails.
* I mention my second name in one email
* My mother’s maiden name in another email.
* My birthdate in another.
* My apartment number in yet another.
Won’t take long before all my “secrets” are revealed and the criminals are using my bank account as their own.
Email, being electronic communication should be presumed to be public since it bounces around on an indeterminate number of public servers and it can easily go to the wrong spot. The other person could share it with anyone by the simple act of hitting the forward button. Also if your email system is being run by an employer or other organisation they reserve the right to monitor usage and content. I’d never put anything in an email I wasn’t happy for the whole world to know, especially if I were a public person of any sort.
Whether they should be or not, everyone should assume that anything you put into an email is public. Every email can be forwarded to someone else, who can then forward it again. Just ask Carl Paladino about how “private” emails can suddenly become public.
The problem with “climategate” wasn’t that the emails were released to the public, it’s that Fox and other rightwing media outlets quotemined them to create a false impression that scientists were engaging in deceptive practices in order to fudge the data.
Every phone call could be intercepted or the person could repeat what you told them to a third party. Do you think all phone conversations should be public?
Not exactly a good analogy. Unless it’s recorded, a phone is not a permanent record of what someone said. An email is. And in most states, it’s illegal to record someone’s voice without their consent or a court order.
It’s not illegal to forward an email. For that reason, it’s just be common sense to assume anything you put in an email could be made public, whether you think it should be or not.
You have to understand how the internet works.
As a distributed system of interconnected but separate systems, it is designed to collect and redistribute email to allow that email to get to where it is going regardless of outages and blockages in the system.
As email is redistributed, each system records the email it receives before sending it along. Those copies may or may not be erased periodically.
Sysadmins for any system that has redistributed your email has the ability to look at and read your email, as well as copy it and forward it to someone else.
Your email is only protected from this if it is encrypted.
As a support tech for the Federal Government, I have told my users for over two decades that you should treat email as totally unprotected and open – that you should NEVER put anything in an email you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow morning…