NY Times breaks new story on snooping
...Unless, that is, you are a terrorist then the NY Times and the ACLU will leap to your defense.Spurned lovers steal each other’s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other’s e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities.
Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients’ adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.
“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. “It has completely changed our field.”
Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples’ lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.
“Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don’t really care about you,” said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. “No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you.”
Most of these stories do not end amicably. This year, a technology consultant from the Philadelphia area, who did not want his name used because he has a teenage son, strongly suspected his wife was having an affair. Instead of confronting her, the husband installed a $49 program called PC Pandora on her computer, a laptop he had purchased.
The program surreptitiously took snapshots of her screen every 15 seconds and e-mailed them to him. Soon he had a comprehensive overview of the sites she visited and the instant messages she was sending. Since the program captured her passwords, the husband was also able to get access to and print all the e-mail messages his wife had received and sent over the previous year.
What he discovered ended his marriage. For 11 months, he said, she had been seeing another man — the parent of one of their son’s classmates at a private school outside Philadelphia. The husband said they were not only arranging meetings but also posting explicit photos of themselves on the Web and soliciting sex with other couples.
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Lawyers say the only communications that are consistently protected in a spouse’s private e-mail account are the messages to and from the lawyers themselves, which are covered by lawyer-client privilege.
Perhaps for this reason, divorce lawyers as a group are among the most pessimistic when it comes to assessing the overall state of privacy in the digital age.
“I do not like to put things on e-mail,” said David Levy, a Chicago divorce lawyer. “There’s no way it’s private. Nothing is fully protected once you hit the send button.”...
Note the comment above about Google and Yahoo. The same could be said for the NSA when the come across emails of a Congresswoman's daughter to a student in Iraq, But for some reason that Democrat Congresswoman thinks her daughter's privacy is being invaded.
The lesson in this story is that if you are going to have an affair do so with a terrorist and your communications will be protected unless someone is fortunate enough to be able to get a warrant under the Democrats' terrorist rights initiative.
Hah! Love the terrorist remark... So true. So hey, I wanted to chime in here... I am with the Pandora Corp., the makers of PC Pandora. While some do use our software to spy on significant others/spouces, we mainly intend the software to be used to monitor kids and/or protect company computers/information. We actually give software away FREE to school districts across the country (see: http://www.pcpandora.com/educators.php or Google PC Pandora’s SAFE SCHOOLS and you’ll see it). While no press is necessarily bad press, we encourage folks to use our program responsibly and ethically. :)
ReplyDeleteCheers,
-Ken