Reversal in Councilman decision

Last year, I wrote about US v. Councilman, a court case in which the initial ruling seemed to indicate that it was OK to intercept others’ email under certain conditions. Yesterday the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a new ruling, essentially reversing the old one. Councilman was indicted in 2001 for violating the US federal law covering wiretapping because he was using procmail to copy inbound messages to hosted users on his server. The case was originally dismissed based on Councilman’s claim that the messages he copied were in “electronic storage” (which has a narrow meaning under the 1968 wiretap law), and that what he did wasn’t technically “interception” as defined in the law. The government appealed, and now the Court of Appeals is siding with them. Read their ruling for yourself; after I have time to dig into it a bit more, I’ll have more to say (bearing in mind, of course, that I’m not a lawyer and don’t give legal advice.)