Showing 124 posts tagged email
“Email is the main cause of information overload at work today. It prevents us from being able to make good decisions and tackle important tasks according to priority.”
“If you are working from your inbox, you are working on other people’s priorities”
Unprecedented e-mail privacy bill sent to Texas governor’s desk
Assuming that Texas Governor Rick Perry does not veto it, the Lone Star State appears set to enact the nation’s strongest e-mail privacy bill, requiring state law enforcement agencies to get a warrant for all e-mails, regardless of the age of the e-mail.
On Tuesday, the Texas bill (HB 2268) was sent to Gov. Perry’s desk, where he has until June 16, 2013 to sign it or veto it—if he does neither, it will pass automatically, taking effect on September 1, 2013. The bill would give Texans more privacy over their inbox to shield against state-level snooping, but the bill would not protect against federal investigations. The bill passed both houses of the state legislature earlier this year without a single “nay” vote.
This new bill, if signed, will make Texas law more privacy-conscious than the much-maligned (but frustratingly still in effect) 1986-era Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), where federal law enforcement agencies are only required to get a warrant to access recent e-mails before they are opened by the recipient.
» via ars technica
Holder backs warrant requirement for most email searches
Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday that the Justice Department will likely support legislation requiring law enforcement officers to obtain a warrant before accessing private online messages, such as emails or Facebook messages.
“It is something that I think the Department will support,” Holder said in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
He urged Congress to exempt “certain very limited circumstances” such as civil investigations.
Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will start deliberating a measure that would require the government to get a search warrant, issued by a judge, to gain access to personal e-mails and all other electronic content held by a third-party service provider.
The current statute requires a warrant for e-mails that are less than six months old. But it lets the authorities gain access to older communications — or bizarrely, e-mails that have already been opened — with just a subpoena and no judicial review.
The law governs the privacy of practically everything entrusted to the Internet — family photos stored with a Web service, journal entries kept online, company documents uploaded to the cloud, and the flurry of e-mails exchanged every day. The problem is that it was written when the cloud was just vapor in the sky.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
“It’s not just e-mails. Unreturned phone calls, texts and messages via social media can be just as irritating. But I’m going to concentrate on e-mails because for most people (teenage sons excepted), they are the most common tool of business and personal communication. A large part of the problem, said Terri Kurtzberg, an associate professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, is that in face-to-face or phone conversations, “it’s clear how long a silence should last before you need to respond,” she said. “There’s no norm with digital communication.”
IRS may be reading emails without a warrant
In order to catch instances of criminal tax evasion the IRS may be violating the Fourth Amendment, the ACLU reported Wednesday. The civil liberties group obtained documents via FOIA that suggest that the IRS is reading Americans’ emails without warrants, although the agency remains cagey about its surveillance practices.
» via Salon
U.S. cyber plan calls for private-sector scans of Net
The U.S. government is expanding a cybersecurity program that scans Internet traffic headed into and out of defense contractors to include far more of the country’s private, civilian-run infrastructure.
As a result, more private sector employees than ever before, including those at big banks, utilities and key transportation companies, will have their emails and Web surfing scanned as a precaution against cyber attacks.
» via Yahoo! News
Finally, Feds say cops’ access to your e-mail shouldn’t be time-dependent
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice acknowledged for the first time that the notion that e-mail more than 180 days old should require a different legal standard is outdated.
This marked shift in legal theory, combined with new House subcommittee hearings and new Senate legislation, might just actually yield real, meaningful reform on the much-maligned Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It’s an act, by the way, that dates back to 1986.
» via ars technica
Harvard Hacked Staff E-Mails
Harvard secretly searched the e-mail accounts of several of its staff members last fall, looking for the source of news media leaks about its recent cheating scandal, but did not tell them about the searches for several months, people briefed on the matter said on Saturday.
The searches, first reported by The Boston Globe, involved the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans, but most of them were not told of the searches until the last few days, after The Globe inquired about them. Resident deans straddle the roles of administrators and faculty members, teaching classes as lecturers while living in Harvard’s undergraduate residential houses as student advocates and advisers.
In August, an administration memo to the resident deans, on how to advise students being brought up on cheating charges before the Administrative Board, a committee of faculty members responsible for enforcing regulations, made its way to news organizations. The e-mail searches were intended to find the source of leak, but no one was disciplined in the matter.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
