By Kristin Billera

The contents of your email are strictly the business of you and the recipient, right? Maybe not. Lawyers defending David Kernell, who was accused of hacking into Sarah Palin’s email last year, have unveiled an interesting defense, which, if it holds up, could have serious implications for Internet privacy.

Kernell, was indicted on one felony count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as three other charges of identity theft for impersonating Palin to access her email, wire fraud for planning to defraud Palin of her property by obtaining information from her email account and reposting it on an Internet forum and obstruction of justice for destroying evidence. The charges were also amended to state that Kernell had violated Palin’s privacy, which is a tort under Tennessee law, where Kernell lives. Now, Kernell’s attorney is claiming that Palin’s privacy isn’t protected because the photos he obtained from her email were of people who “continue to regularly and voluntarily appear in the national media.”

Regardless of whether the photos had been published by the media previously with the approval of Palin, I don’t see how her privacy wasn’t violated. For the most part, emails are meant to be seen by the sender and the recipient and if they weren’t subject to some level of privacy, people wouldn’t bother to password protect them. They are entirely different than something such as Facebook or an Internet forum as well, other examples of password protected websites, which function as sort of limited public forums of cyberspace because their content is accessible to many people. If anything, emails should be entitled to the similar protections as mail sent by the post office. It is a violation of the law to take, open or interfere with someone else’s regular mail, with no exceptions if the enclosed information is public record.

Email shouldn’t be treated any differently.

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