On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 03:12:02PM -0700, Brian Phillips wrote:
> 
> Basically, which email did OIT read? (I assume you were on-campus when you
> penned "The Joke", if not, please correct me)
> A) your outgoing mail as it went from your on-campus laptop mail client to
> mcnabbs.org server
> B) your incoming mail as it passed from mcnabbs.org to the CS department
> mailing list

That's a great question.  I think it was probably B, because I was
hoping that A was using TLS, but it's hard to say for sure.  As of last
night, I am sure that my TLS is working really well, but I'm not 100%
confident that it was working earlier.

In any case, it sounds like they try to snoop all traffic, both incoming
and outgoing, but it isn't a transparent policy.


> With regards to the discussion, I think there should be a distinguished
> difference in the expectations of privacy involved in both A and B.  If I'm
> reading the scenario right, your joke message passed through BOTH A & B, but
> there are certainly countless messages moving through BYU's tubes that fall
> in one case or the other, but not both.  My personal opinion is that
> snooping case A is pretty big-brotherish, but snooping case B is acceptable
> to me.

Snooping case B is still pretty big-brotherish to me.  First of all,
even the CS department administrators weren't aware that this snooping
is happening (and it's certainly not something running on their mail
server).  Second, I can't control email coming into campus.  In an ideal
world, I can be careful to never send confidential emails, but I cannot
control what other people send me.  So if someone sends something
confidential to my CS department address, there's nothing I can do to
stop BYU bureaucrats from eavesdropping.


-- 
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55  8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868
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