Re: is SMTP a candidate for OPES ?

[Alex Rousskov <rousskov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

jfc,

	IMHO, the stupidity of judges or laws should not limit OPES
scope. OPES framework (in a broad sense) is applicable to any
communication between content producer and content consumer. Whether
the unit of communication is "stored and forwarded" or "just
forwarded" is irrelevant from architecture/scope point of view. It may
affect how and when the adaptations are performed, but not whether
they can be performed in an OPES-compliant way.

	The old OPES architecture draft may not reflect this and other
scope concerns, but that's a different question/problem.

Alex.


On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, jfcm wrote:

>
> The attached piece of real world's information seems to be worth
> consideration. This is legal, political and US centric. Nevertheless it
> means that SMTP (mail transfer) is not seen by many (legally and
> technically) as a stream but as fast store and forward and that different
> legal rules (and therefore applications/business/demands/offers may be
> conceived depending on where is the filter (on the protocol or on the node).
>
> It seems to me this is another contradiction of OPES/ONES with the
> "protocol on the wire" and "dumb network/smart host" concepts. I am not an
> SMPT pro, but I suppose that the difference is that in HTTP forwards a flow
> of datagrams while SMTP stops+store+forwards a group of datagrams building
> an entire message. For example, you cannot know the true user's value of a
> mail before you got to the attachement or to the final signature.
> jfc
>
> --------------
>
>  From the New York Times --
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/technology/06net.html
>
> You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It)
> By SAUL HANSELL
>
> When everything is working right, an e-mail message appears to zip
> instantaneously from the sender to the recipient's inbox. But in reality,
> most messages make several momentary stops as they are processed by various
> computers en route to their destination.
>
> Those short stops may make no difference to the users, but they make an
> enormous difference to the privacy that e-mail is accorded under federal law.
>
> Last week a federal appeals court in Boston ruled that federal wiretap laws
> do not apply to e-mail messages if they are stored, even for a millisecond,
> on the computers of the Internet providers that process them - meaning that
> it can be legal for the government or others to read such messages without
> a court order.
>
> The ruling was a surprise to many people, because in 1986 Congress
> specifically amended the wiretap laws to incorporate new technologies like
> e-mail. Some argue that the ruling's implications could affect emerging
> applications like Internet-based phone calls and Gmail, Google's new e-mail
> service, which shows advertising based on the content of a subscriber's
> e-mail messages.
>
> "The court has eviscerated the protections that Congress established back
> in the 1980's," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the
> Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group.
>
> But other experts argue that the Boston case will have little practical
> effect. The outcry, said Stuart Baker, a privacy lawyer with Steptoe &
> Johnson in Washington, is "much ado about nothing."
>
> Mr. Baker pointed out that even under the broadest interpretation of the
> law, Congress made it easier for prosecutors and lawyers in civil cases to
> read other people's e-mail messages than to listen to their phone calls.
> The wiretap law - which requires prosecutors to prove their need for a
> wiretap and forbids civil litigants from ever using them - applies to
> e-mail messages only when they are in transit.
>
> But in a 1986 law, Congress created a second category, called stored
> communication, for messages that had been delivered to recipients' inboxes
> but not yet read. That law, the Stored Communications Act, grants
> significant protection to e-mail messages, but does not go as far as the
> wiretap law: it lets prosecutors have access to stored messages with a
> search warrant, while imposing stricter requirements on parties in civil suits.
>
> Interestingly, messages that have been read but remain on the Internet
> provider's computer system have very little protection. Prosecutors can
> typically gain access to an opened e-mail message with a simple subpoena
> rather than a search warrant. Similarly, lawyers in civil cases, including
> divorces, can subpoena opened e-mail messages.
>
> The case in Boston involved an online bookseller, now called Alibris. In
> 1998, the company offered e-mail accounts to book dealers and, hoping to
> gain market advantage, secretly copied messages they received from
> Amazon.com. In 1999, Alibris and one employee pleaded guilty to criminal
> wiretapping charges.
>
> But a supervisor, Bradford C. Councilman, fought the charges, saying he did
> not know about the scheme. He also moved to have the case dismissed on the
> ground that the wiretapping law did not apply. He argued that because the
> messages had been on the hard drive of Alibris's computer while they were
> being processed for delivery, they counted as stored communication. The
> wiretap law bans a company from monitoring the communications of its
> customers, except in a few cases. But it does not ban a company from
> reading customers' stored communications.
>
> "Congress recognized that any time you store communication, there is an
> inherent loss of privacy," said Mr. Councilman's lawyer, Andrew Good of
> Good & Cormier in Boston.
>
> In 2003, a federal district court in Boston agreed with Mr. Councilman's
> interpretation of the wiretap law and dismissed the case. Last week, the
> First Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, affirmed that decision.
>
> Because most major Internet providers have explicit policies against
> reading their customers' e-mail messages, the ruling would seem to have
> little effect on most people.
>
> But this year Google is testing a service called Gmail, which
> electronically scans the content of the e-mail messages its customers
> receive and then displays related ads. Privacy groups have argued that the
> service is intrusive, and some have claimed it violates wiretap laws. The
> Councilman decision, if it stands, could undercut that argument.
>
> Federal prosecutors, who often argue that wiretap restrictions do not apply
> in government investigations, were in the somewhat surprising position of
> arguing that those same laws should apply to Mr. Councilman's conduct. A
> spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Boston said the
> department had not decided whether to appeal.
>
> Mr. Baker said that another federal appeals court ruling, in San Francisco,
> is already making it hard for prosecutors to retrieve e-mail that has been
> read and remains on an Internet provider's system.
>
> In that case, Theofel v. Farey-Jones, a small Internet provider responded
> to a subpoena by giving a lawyer copies of 339 e-mail messages received by
> two of its customers.
>
> The customers claimed the subpoena was so broad it violated the wiretap and
> stored communication laws. A district court agreed the subpoenas were too
> broad, but ruled they were within the law. The plaintiffs appealed, and the
> Justice Department filed a friend of the court brief arguing that the
> Stored Communications Act should not apply.
>
> In February, the appeals court ruled that e-mail stored on the computer
> server of an Internet provider is indeed covered by the Stored
> Communications Act, even after it has been read. The court noted that the
> act refers both to messages before they are delivered and to backup copies
> kept by the Internet provider. "An obvious purpose for storing a message on
> an I.S.P.'s server after delivery," the court wrote, " is to provide a
> second copy of the message in the event that the user needs to download it
> again - if, for example, the message is accidentally erased from the user's
> own computer."
>
> Calling e-mail "stored communication" does not necessarily reduce privacy
> protections for most e-mail users. While the Councilman ruling would limit
> the applicability of wiretap laws to e-mail, it appears to apply to a very
> small number of potential cases. The Theofel decision, by contrast, by
> defining more e-mail as "stored communications," is restricting access to
> e-mail in a wide range of cases in the Ninth Circuit, and could have a far
> greater effect on privacy if courts in the rest of the country follow that
> ruling.
>
>