[3836] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Harvard's email intrusion explanation fails the
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (PRIVACY Forum mailing list)
Mon Mar 11 14:48:18 2013
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:27:38 -0700
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Harvard's email intrusion explanation fails the smell test
"Harvard Offers Explanation for Search of E-Mail Accounts" (New York Times)
"Harvard University on Monday offered its first public comments on its
searching of staff members' e-mail accounts, saying that the
administration had not notified most of those employees because it
wanted to protect the one who inadvertently leaked confidential
material to the news media."
- - -
OK, let's get a couple of things straight here. First, if Harvard
wants to assert that the Terms of Service of their email system
permits administrators to monitor the contents of email, that's within
their rights. This is not at all an uncommon arrangement for
corporate email systems, though whether or not the Harvard community
would agree that it's appropriate in their case is a different
question. But for Harvard to try to suggest that their intrusion was
less significant because only Subject lines were inspected is
mealymouthed nonsense of the sort we expect from governments trying to
excuse their own email intrusions. Subject lines contain a great deal
of information, and for some messages represent the entire effective
contents! Trying to claim Subject lines are not content just doesn't
fly. Also, there was of course no guarantee that the Subject lines
would indicate who had forwarded the messages of interest in this
case, since (not exactly headline news!) it's possible to forward
messages (and copy/past text) under completely different Subject
lines. So no matter how you slice it, Harvard's overall explanation
doesn't seem to really pass the smell test very well at all. Very
disappointing from a great educational institution.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
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- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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