Summaries of The Decisions About The Act
Several court cases have raised the question of whether e-mail messages are protected under the stricter provisions of Title I while they were in transient storage en route to their final destination. In United States v. Councilman, a U.S. district court and a three-judge appeals panel ruled they were not, but in 2005, the full United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed this opinion. Privacy advocates were relieved; they had argued in Amicus curiae briefs that if the ECPA did not protect e-mail in temporary storage, its added protections were meaningless as virtually all electronic mail is stored temporarily in transit at least once and that Congress would have known this in 1986 when the law was passed. (see, e.g., RFC 822). The case was eventually dismissed on grounds unrelated to ECPA issues.
The seizure of a computer, used to operate an electronic bulletin board system, and containing private electronic mail which had been sent to (stored on) the bulletin board, but not read (retrieved) by the intended recipients, doesn't constitute an unlawful intercept under the Federal Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. s 2510, et seq., as amended by Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Title I. Government may track cell phone, in real time, without search warrant, under Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), by analyzing information as to antennae being contacted by cell phones, so long as tracking does not involve cell phone being used in private place where visual surveillance would not be available.
In "WebcamGate", Rollins v. Lower Merion School District (2010), plaintiffs charged that two suburban Philadelphia high schools secretly spied on students by surreptitiously and remotely activating webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home, violating the Act. The schools admitted to secretly snapping over 66,000 webshots and screenshots, including webcam shots of students in their bedrooms.
Read more about this topic: Electronic Communications Privacy Act
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