U.S. vs Councilman opens door for admin snoops

The Electronic Frontier Foundation charges that this weeks appeals court decision in U.S. vs Councilman gives your ISP the right to monitor your email.

The court brief is http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/03-1383-01A.pdf

The defendant used procmail and sendmail to monitor email from Amazon to the booksellers and other email clients that used his mailserver. He used a form of store and forward to do this. I believe the courts have held that wiretapping is grabbing the message off the line with a sniffer. It is a different charge when the mail is in storage. The courts dismissed the charges against the defendant stating that at the time the message was copied it wasn't in transit.

I agree that he is not guilty of wiretapping. I'll have to go reread the Stored Communications Act to see if his claim of being a service provider is correct. I am currently in a cyberlaw class and we read the lower court ruling on US v Councilman a couple weeks ago. So I was pretty excited to see this case.