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

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Wed Aug 8 14:12:22 BST 2012


On Wed, 08 Aug 2012 11:15:26 +0100, Caspar Bowden (travelling)  
<tharg at gmx.net> wrote:

>> Which is irrelevant to the case in question, which was concerned with
>> interception *without* a warrant.
>
> I thought we were discussing the case of intercepting "external" vs.
> "internal" both of which require warrants (as opposed to stuff
> originating and finishing outside UK which requires no warrant at all -
> like all other countries AFAIK)

Ah! So Alice is outside the UK, but the place where the message is  
'exploded' is in a location where "they" can intercept it. At that stage  
they don't know who the recipients are (just that they are Alice's  
"friends"). They don't know whether Bob (in the UK) is one of them, so  
they get to see a message with anonymous recipients, now AFATCS related to  
Bob. So that is probably OK.

But if the messaging system does include To: addresses, in some envelope  
or otherwise, thay can hardly fail to notice that Bob (known to be in the  
UK) is a recipient, inless their cunning software edits him out of the  
recipients list before they get to read it.

Again, if the message is addressed to a mailing list expander, then the  
ultimate recipients are anonymous, but if the mailing list itself (which  
is the addressee at that point) is clearly UK-based, then they are stuck.

But the whole point of my series of messages is that "they" must be able  
to show "plausible deniability" that they are not intercepting messages  
addressed to UK recipients, and that how they achieve that is "their"  
problem.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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