Starmer dumps doormat?

[Peter Fairbrother]

Peter Sommer wrote:

> If you stick to RIPA and interception,  the general view is that 
> interception only occurs when something is in the course of transmission 
> (as Caspar report).  Once it has been received it is no longer "in the 
> course of transmission" 

That's not what RIPA says - according to RIPA a message can have been 
received and still be in transmission. This is the mistake which the 
Police, CPS etc have been making, and hopefully will stop making.

I made this mistake myself too for a while, as did many other people 
here - it's only about a year ago I said here to much disagreement (and 
apparently one or two people still disagree) that I thought that 
according to RIPA whether a message has been read has no bearing on 
whether it is in transmission or not - so don't blame them too much.

If you are used to looking at things like letters which are either in 
transmission or not, it's hard to take the step to a message which can 
be both in transmission and not in transmission at the same time.





I know the law doesn't actually do this, but might be easier to look at 
an electronic message as lots of copies. If a copy was created inside a 
transmission system it is is transmission. Forever.


If you copy that copy, or even just look at it [7], it's interception 
unless you are the sender/recipient, or you are doing so in order to 
transmit it to the recipient.

This is actually almost identical to what RIPA actually says, but in 
very different form - and it's also the doormat.

But it's a step to get here, too ... :)


-- Peter Fairbrother

[7] it is of course at least impractical to look at a copy without 
copying it, and it's theoretically impossible if you define look and 
copy right.