ZA approves RIP analog

[Philip Rowlands]

On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

>He uses the content of emails as input to the scanning program which decides
>whether to discard an individual email.

He sets up a computer to perform an action which would be illegal to
perform himself (reading email contents, and acting on them).

I'd argue that, even if the sysadmin's eyes never see the undesirable
(virus) content of a discarded email, he has learnt by ommission the
nature of some of its contents, hence interception.

He knows that the email belongs to the set of !(viruses).

Suppose it's not viruses, but love letters/financial advice/medical
reports. A filter could delete messages from abc@example.com with
"Dinner tonight?" as the subject, or delay their delivery 24 hours.

Unless he seeks to learn the actions of his mailserver (e.g. reading the
logfiles), is any of this meta-content information "made available"?
Must the virus scanner operate without logging to be non-intercepting?


Cheers,

Phil