one-to-many messaging

[Clive D. W. Feather]

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In article <00a801c89ee5$a75f7710$e57ea8c0@Jinja>, James Firth 
<james2@jfirth.net> writes
>But didn't R v. Stanford establish that whilst the operator had rights to
>control and access the system, this didn't exempt them from criminal
>liability for intercepting communications?

No.

R v Stanford was another case dealing with the meaning of authorisation.

"1(6) The circumstances in which a person makes an interception of a 
communication in the course of its transmission by means of a private 
telecommunication system are such that his conduct is excluded from 
criminal liability under subsection (2) if
(a) he is a person with a right to control the operation or the use of 
the system; or
(b) he has the express or implied consent of such a person to make the 
interception."

Stanford claimed that he arranged for X to carry out interceptions. X 
was an administrator of the system and, he argued, therefore "a person 
with the right to control the operation or the use of the system". The 
court decided that X's permission from the owner of the network to 
manipulate the system was only for the purpose of normal administration 
and *not* for these interceptions, which the owner would not have agreed 
to. Therefore, for the purposes of these interceptions X was not a 
person meeting the test of 1(6). Therefore the interception was 
criminal, therefore Cliff was guilty.

If the owner had asked X to do things that included interception [1], 
then X's authority would have extended to intercepting and so he (and 
thus Cliff) would have been protected by 1(6).

[All this from memory. I thought I had the decision on my laptop, but it 
seems not.]

[1] There's another case whose name I forget (possibly R v Stipendary 
Magistrates ex parte someone-or-other) about consent in relation to the 
Computer Misuse Act. The court found that consent for a particular type 
of operation *still* didn't give permission to carry out that action on 
data that the owner didn't expect. Following this argument, X would 
require authority to intercept the class of email actually intercepted, 
not just interception of email in general.

- -- 
Clive D.W. Feather                       | Home: <clive@davros.org>
Tel: +44 20 8495 6138 (work)             | Web:  <http://www.davros.org>
Fax: +44 870 051 9937                    | Work: <clive@demon.net>
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