Keeping Your Email Private
Private e-mail, as the Terry Milewksi affair in Canada shows, is anything but private.
And Milewski is in good company. Down south, Oliver North, Monica Lewinsky and even Bill Gates (during the recent antitrust trial) have had their private electronic communications made public. In Canada, citizens criticizing a company in Hamilton found their emails subject to a threat of lawsuits.
Long before the Chretien government tried to blatantly use a journalist's private correspondence for its own political purposes, I warned in a previous Media column.
"Your private emails are kept on at least four different computers - your hard drive, your recipient's hard drive, and the servers that provide the Internet service for both you and your correspondent. Nothing technically stops your employer - or, presumably, the police armed with a legitimate warrant -- from accessing your old email messages."
Let's hope more journalists heed those words. Because the legal waters surrounding the privacy of email are at best murky.
MURKY LEGAL WATERS
It is against the law to intercept private, personal communications. But is email private?
"Email seized from a mailbox at your ISP would be fair game," says David Jones of the Electronic Frontier Canada , a lobby group fighting for web privacy and freedoms.
Jones says the police and authorities "intercept" in an extremely narrow manner, so that only email captured "off the wire" would be improper. EFC wants a wider interpretation to coincide with what it says most Canadians think of the word "intercept."
"In our view, it should be illegal for a third party to read the email before it reaches the recipient," says Jones.
But the legal precedents are not good - especially for the more public kind of email sent to chat groups, or usenet groups.
Last summer, an Ontario waste management company, Philip Services, got a Canadian court order to oblige internet service providers (ISP) to turn over the names and addresses of email writers who had criticized the company in a public chat group.
"The laws apply across all kinds of media," warns Lynda Kuhn of Philip Services. "Something that no one could get away with saying in a newspaper or magazine, somehow some people think you can get away with on the web."
Critics say Philips is trying to stifle its critics with costly legal battles; the company insists some of the messages included threats and racial slurs.
But the implications of the case are serious, regardless. Kuhn says they received many calls from companies around North America interested in Philips' tough stance on going after email writers.
David Jones of the EFC worries that in the Philips case, "almost all of the ISPs rolled over" without considering if the court order was valid.
"One of the real problems with email privacy is that when police approach an ISP and ask for access to someone's email the person making the decision about whether or not to comply is not the person who's privacy is at stake," warns Jones. " For the ISP staff person it is a business decision: Will the cop stop wasting my valuable time if I give him what he wants?"
ENCRYPTION MOST SECURE
Aside from staying out of chat groups or watching what you say, is there anything you can do to keep your email private?
There are two ways to gain some measure of privacy:
ENCRYPTION: You identify who you are, but hide the content of your message to everyone but the intended receiver.
ANONYMIZING: You don't hide what you're saying, but you disguise your identity.
The most secure way to send email is through encryption - "much like having a vault for your email" as McAfee puts it.
McAfee sells the most popular encryption tool called Pretty Good Privacy. It scrambles your email into an unreadable gibberish that can only be unlocked by you or someone you authorize.
(A free version is available or you can purchase a souped-up version for about $60.)
PGP is simple to use because it attaches to your regular email software and once installed, you decide which messages you want to encrypt. The disadvantage is that you have to be sure your correspondents have your decoding key.
Here is how it works: To send someone a private email message, you use a copy of that person's public key to encrypt the information, and the recipient uses their private key to decipher the information. Conversely, when someone sends you encrypted mail, they use a copy of your public key to encrypt the information, and you use your private key to decipher the information.
Another free product you can try before you buy is called SecretMail. As the company PR so aptly puts it: "Using the e-mail today, is similar to sending messages, even confidential ones, on a post card. But with regular mail, people usually send their letters (even non-confidential ones) in envelopes. Why should we not have the same possibility on the Internet?"
You can download a fully working demo version of Secret Mail with only one limitation - you can have only two correspondents in your Secret Mail Address Book. (Pay if your want more.)
SecretMail is easy to use because you simply "drop" your secret messages into SecretMail's enveloppes and they are sent encrypted. The disadvantage is that it runs as an independent mail program - you can't use your regular mail software - and both you and your email pal need the program.
BE ANONYMOUS
The second tactic is simply to hide your identity. This is often not useful for journalists and some news organizations insist their reporters must always identify themselves as news people.
But if you don't want to leave a web trail or are worried about your personal security, you can shield yourself in various ways:
ANONYMIZER offers anonymous e-mail through their special email service . The remailer strips away your real name and address and substitutes a fake address. But it is also not useful for speedy journalistic communications. The company warns it can take up to two days for your message to be reach its destination.
FREE WEB-BASED EMAIL is a faster way to send a discreet message, using Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) or Hotmail (www.hotmail.com.) . Essentially, you create an alias - innocent@yahoo.com instead of pryingreporter@dailyrag.com. One problem is that these services are not secure because they are web-based and the companies have a record of who you really are.
ZERO-KNOWLEDGE of Montreal may offer the best guarantee of web privacy ( for a small monthly fee. ) Its new product called Freedom uses digital pseudonyms so even the company does not know who you are - and no one can trace you. It is still is the beta test stages and should be released by February, 1999.
DejaNews offers a simple, but unfortunately very unpublicized way to prevent your emails from being archived in Usenet chat groups. Type in the words "x-no-archive: yes" on the first line of the body of message your send.
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