Email Privacy

How private are your e-mails ?

It always worth thinking of the contents of an e-mail as being as secure as a postcard sent by snail mail. Theoretically anything transmitted through the Internet can be intercepted en-route by those other than your intended recipient.

It is obvious that information posted up in e-mailing lists or newsgroups is completely open to view by anyone, so it's best not to send any information through the Internet that you'd not want other people to see, especially as the contents of e-mails can be seen as evidence in a court of law . A few years ago some free party organisers in North Wales (with their anti-rave 'task force') were paid a visit from the boys in blue after posting up party details in k.music.rave. Though the UK police have historically been rather unenlightened they are now catching up in the on-line world.

Talks are currently being held between the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Internet Service Providers Association (IPSA) to set principles about the police 'rights' and abilities to intercept and open e-mail or other on-line communications. Obviously the police need the right to access on-line information if they have prior evidence of illegal activities being organised through on-line communications, but the moot point is how much evidence will they need in order to gain the right to go nosing through private communications. They are also looking for the power to gain access to the logs which record which web sites a user has been accessing.

Feeling a little twitchy? It’s not that we are all dirty little perverts but hey - I’ve looked for hard core porn purely to research how easy it is to come by. Like real life if it’s hard core enough you have to look long and hard for it and it won’t be free, but I don’t want the log of my research efforts being raised later in a court of law!

The issue here is one of Civil Liberties and the right of privacy. It’s not that the majority of us have anything to hide - it’s just that an e-mail, like a letter should be seen as a private communication between chosen individuals. I personally don’t like the thought of someone
taking a peek at my letters before I open them. The worry is that the contents of e-mails may not be given the same amount of protection as much as traditional communications like snail mail or telephone.

Your Internet Service Provider has the ability to access your e-mails while they are housed on their server, but once they are removed there is nor record. If you are using a POP3 account which gives you the ability to leave your messages on the server after retrieval then un-check this box so that once you have picked up your mail it is only stored locally on your machine. If you have the type of account where messages are kept remotely on a server (like a HotMail account) then it’s up to you to delete anything you wish to remain private.

There is a cryptography system you can use to protect the privacy of your messages called Pretty Good Privacy or PGP. It offers a method of encoding where you have 2 keys one public and one private. You distribute the public key openly so that people can use it to send mails
to you, but as you are the only person with the private key, only you can open and read them.

It has caused all sorts of problems in America where it is illegal to export certain software with this technology, and you can actually be prosecuted for the ‘export of munitions’. This has prompted cases of people tattooing the codes onto their bodies and then ‘exporting’
themselves to protest against the restrictions! PGP is available easily on the Internet but make sure you only download it from sites outside the US as otherwise under US law you will be committing an offence.

With the onset of more on-line communications things will get more restricted than they are now. In the good old days of the Internet most regulation came from within but the number of users were tiny in comparison to now. There is a need for some regulation but with the same rights of protection we are allowed for other forms of communication.

At least things aren’t as bad here as in China. Apparently during the Tianamen Square massacre, the Chinese authorities had heard that reports of what was going on were being distributed internationally by "email" .. so they promptly cordoned off all their post offices. It took them a little while to work out that email did not in fact go through their post office system...

Helen Rees

Good sites to follow up:

http://home.earthlink.net/~rjswan/pgp/ - PGP resources & Tutorial
http://eff.org - Electronic Frontier Foundation (started the Blue Ribbon
Campaign to combat censorship of the Internet
http://www.cyber-rights.org - Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK)