The federal wiretap law was expanded in 1986 to prohibit employers, including the government, from accessing employee work computer records. Under the law, the government is allowed to conduct clandestine searches if the employee is suspected of espionage or theft. Pederson was under no such suspicion. [I guess this is the ECPA?] I'd like someone to provide some statute citations or some case law to back this up. As I read the ECPA, nothing in it prevents an employer from looking at employee files. (Admittedly, the government may be different.) The following quote is from @article{hernandez, title = {{ECPA} and Online Computer Privacy}, author = {Ruel Torres Hernandez}, journal = {Federal Communications Law Journal}, volume = 41, number = 1, month = {November}, year = 1988, pages = {17--41} } ECPA protection in the employer-employee situation may indeed be non-existent. [Footnote: This legislative intent to exclude corporate monitoring of employees from ECPA was confirmed by those who followed the drafting of the legislation. According to Jerry Berman, counsel for the Americal Civil Liberties Union, a participant in the drafting of th elegislation, ``ECPA `goes right up to the water's edge [of employee privacy protection] but stops short' and to have included some employee privacy protection against employers in the corporate context `would have killed the bill.' '' Electronic message from Brock Meeks (Mar. 31, 1988)] While the corporate exception acknolwedges an employer's property rights in all parts of his business, it leaves the employee's privacy interests completely unprotected. I should note that the ECPA also explicitly permits monitoring ``as may be necessarily incident to ... the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that service''. Again, if anyone has hard citations to the contrary, I'd really like to know. In the case that has drawn the most attention, the Epson email case, the claim was based on a state law that protects employee telephone calls. From what I've read, the judge rule against the plaintiff on the grounds that only voice calls were protected. That ruling was apparently not appealed, probably because there was little chance that that holding would be overturned. --Steve Bellovin