E-mail Privacy

[Todd Hooper]

In article <DXG4ZT at dri.com>, braun at dri.com (Kral) writes:
> In article <1991Jun14.153835.8709 at cc.curtin.edu.au> chooper at cc.curtin.edu.au (Todd Hooper) writes:
>>
>>Personally, I totally ignore the 'subject' header of bounced mail. In this
>>case, I would have ignored it as well. It is the job of academic staff to
>>uncover plagiarism - not mine.
> 
> How is this different from:
> 
> 	"It is the job of the police to deal with robberies, not mine (so
> 	I won't report this obvious burglary I'm seeing to the police)"
> 
> 	"It is the job of the police to deal with rape crimes (etc)".

Regardless of this criticism (and Karl's comments along similar lines) I still 
stand by my original statement. Just because the mail message in question has 
a subject header of 'Assignment 1 source code' doesn't give me any more right 
to delve into the contents than if the subject header said 'Saucy details of 
my weekend holiday'. 

By _assuming_ that the mail must contain some assignment source code, you are
simply justifying an invasion of privacy that may be totally unwarranted. What
if you started reading the message only to discover that the subject header was
a joke? Do you simply 'unread' what you have read?

Also, the actions you note above are fairly serious crimes. I wouldn't have 
any hesitiation reporting serious crimes to the police. On the other hand,
a report of plagiarism coming from a systems administrator could literally ruin
a students academic career, with only a single item of circumstantial evidence.

>>I think a consistent policy of enforcing privacy
>>is the best defense. If it is known that you might read mail, or interpret the
>>contents in some way (even if this only involves looking at the subject line)
>>then you may leave yourself open to more problems (e.g. why didn't you stop
>>this hacker mailing /etc/passwd to someone?).
> 
> This is easy to explain in economic terms: does the administration wish to pay
> for someone to spend all day long looking into other peoples files and
> monitoring all email?  Explain it to them like that, and they will have to
> agree that it is an unreasonable expectation.

Exactly. However, academic staff are _paid_ to detect plagiarism as part of the
assesment of student work. So why should I violate ethical principles,
considering that the University has already taken action to stop plagiarism?

Todd