What is a "communication" (was Re: sorry, but ...

[Charles Lindsey]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:24:06 +0100, Caspar Bowden (travelling)  
<tharg at gmx.net> wrote:

>> How do we extend that theory to the situation where there are many  
>> receivers in many countries,
>
> In ***theory***, it should be that if all the recipients are inside the  
> UK, then it's internal, but if at least one intended recipient is  
> outside UK, then its external, but...

I would have expected exactly the opposite.

If the message is from Alice (known to be in the UK, and easily shown to  
be such) via Facebook to Bob (who happens to be in the UK) and Others  
(outside the UK, and probably a bunch of villains) then if "they"  
intercept the message on its way to Facebook without warrant, they have  
intercepted a message from Alice to Bob, which is not allowed. End of  
story AFAICS.

If "they" imagine that they are intecepting messages from Alice to the  
villains, they have neverthelsss intercepted Alice to Bob (because the  
same message is sent to all of them). They can't pretend they have read  
the body of the message to the villains but carefully omitted to read the  
message to Bob, unless they are wearing glasses with some very peculiar  
filters in them indeed.

There is an onus on "them" not to break the law - how they avoid that is  
their problem but, in this case the technology is definitely against them.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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