No Permission Necessary to Record Chat

The AP wire reports that the Washington State Supreme Court has decided that police may record transcripts of online chat without court permission. The Fourth Amendment requires G-men to have such permission to tap phone calls, but apparently we shouldn't have the same expectation of privacy in a chat room.

Not a wiretap

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article, this was not a wiretap - the IP packets were not intercepted at a router, the conversation was recorded by the person on the other end. This would be like talking to someone over the phone, and having them record it - isn't this what Linda Tripp did? IIRC, that evidence was allowed to be used. This is not a fourth amendment issue, but a Washinton state law issue (from the article: 'Washington's Privacy Act requires consent of both parties before conversations made over "any electronic device" can be recorded.').

Actually, it would have been quite interesting if the judge ruled that this recording was not legal. Programs like ICQ ship with logging turned on by default, so this have meant that almost every ICQ user in the US was breaking the law (I wonder if AOL/Mirabilis would be liable for encouraging/helping illegal activity...).

Re:Not a wiretap

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet allows such unbelievable anonymity and ease-of-access that any expectation of privacy is essentially nullified. When you engage in a telephone conversation you have an expectation of privacy because you initiated communications which the populace believes for the most part to be secure. No one should reasonably expect that anything they post, say or read on the internet can be protected from anyone, since there is no such thing as real security and there is no easy way to determine an online user's true identity. We've read articles recently about RealJukeBox tracking user activities, we've always had to deal with spam and the fact that there's no means to easily prevent it and we all frequently use encryption in some form or other. Doesn't that say something about the way the public, security administrators and lawmakers think about privacy of communications on the net? So long as no crimes were committed in the logging of these conversations (eg. hacking routers) I think they are quite legal -- and fair. mnp5

Great

[dadith]

Now all they need is to extend this to RL and they can listen to *every* conversation between more than two people (two people could be difficult) without court permission.

STASI anyone?




Ciao, Peter

Its called expectation of privacy.

[Zaffle]

Ok, well, this seems to be mainly about recording transcripts with the agent as the 2nd person. Unless its a public forum, such as an IRC chat channel, or slashdot comments, its very difficult to log "private" conversations between two people unless you have the help of one of those persons, or you seek the help of the 3rd party hosting the means to hold this conversation. (eg an IRC server, or in the case of email, one of the users ISPs).

In respect to logging conversations made to a police officer. I agree with the judge. Its called expectation of privacy. People on the net should NOT expect their conversation not to be logged by the user they are talking to.

However, I agree that 3rd party recording (where the recording is done by the police when they aren't involved in the conversation) is in the grey area. Most services that I know of that over "private" conversation (Email, ICQ, IRC, etc) will disclaim that you may not have privacy. Although a lot of IRC servers state that the server does NOT record conversations.

Personally, I log everything I can when it comes to the net. And if I later choose to use those logs, so be it. If someone has a problem with that, they shouldn't have talked to me in the first place.

Washington must have some pretty funny laws. I can't understand how phoning your local police station, and saying "I did it, I killed so and so, and the body is buired here, my name is blah blah, and I live at blah", can be any different to me walking into the police station and saying the exact same thing, except that I save the cops the car trip out to pick me up. (In this case, I'd probably take the bus in, ethier that or find somewhere to park my car long term :))

Re:Not a wiretap

[RFC959]

This would be like talking to someone over the phone, and having them record it - isn't this what Linda Tripp did?

That was exactly the example I'd thought of when I read about this. You can't record something that someone says directly to you, but the police can record things that people say to each other? I suppose we should have just applied the most useful heuristic there is for legal cases: would decision 'A' hamper the ability of the police to do anything they like? If so, the decision will surely be '~A'.