“Employees often think that they should have privacy in their personal electronic-mail communications. But in practice, there really is no legal safeguard within the organization.” Several years ago, e-mail privacy advocates lost an important test case … [The ruling has left civil libertarians glum about the future of e-mail privacy at work.] … “I don’t think you’re going to see any more e-mail litigation. If we can’t win that case in California, we can’t win it anywhere.”
Predictor: Rotenberg, Marc
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, John Whalen does a bit of surveillance at the American Society for Industrial Security’s annual convention, and quotes Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Lewis Maltby of the ACLU. Whalen writes: ”While the courts have ruled that employers cannot monitor their workers’ personal calls, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 grants bosses a ‘business-use exception,’ which allows supervisory and quality-control monitoring. Practically speaking, that leaves a loophole big enough to fly a Stealth bomber through … Ambiguity reigns, for the courts have yet to set a clear precedent on the legality of keystroke monitoring. ‘It gets even trickier when you look at e-mail privacy,’ says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. I dialed Rotenberg up several days after the Las Vegas convention. ‘Employees often think that they should have privacy in their personal electronic-mail communications,’ he explains. ‘But in practice, there really is no legal safeguard within the organization.’ Several years ago, e-mail privacy advocates lost an important test case when a California judge ruled against Alana Shoars, a former e-mail administrator at Epson America Inc. Shoars alleged that her supervisor had printed out and read messages that employees had been assured were private. After she discovered the managerial snooping, Shoars was fired for insubordination, she said. The judge dismissed the case on the grounds that state privacy statutes make no mention of e-mail or the workplace. The ruling has left civil libertarians glum about the future of e-mail privacy at work. Says Lewis Maltby, who runs the ACLU’s workplace rights project, ‘We had the perfect set of circumstances: we had a wonderful plaintiff, we were in California of all places, and we had a great attorney. We lost. I don’t think you’re going to see any more e-mail litigation. If we can’t win that case in California, we can’t win it anywhere.’ Telephone communications and e-mail have some protections under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, but only insofar as they are carried out through a telco common carrier or commercial system such as CompuServe or MCI Mail. Internal electronic mail in the workplace is considered company property.”
Biography:Marc Rotenberg, was founder and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), in the 1990s. He won an EFF Pioneer Award in 1997 for his work as a “champion of privacy, human rights and civil liberties on the electronic frontier.” He targeted the impact of computer and telecommunications technologies on freedom and privacy and was an active writer and speaker on associated topics. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Privacy/Surveillance
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse
Quote Type: Partial quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/security_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney