Possible 5 Years in Jail for Reading Wife's Email

Off Topic
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[quote]VTBalla34 wrote:

[quote]HeavyTriple wrote:
I agree that there should be privacy in the marriage, and I certainly don’t think I would be entitled to know every facet of a wife’s life or that I should even be able to read everything she writes. However, if I had good reason to suspect my wife was cheating, and she left her password in public view, I don’t see anything criminal about a little snooping. No need to hire a PI when I could just as easily do it for free. I’ll try to find a more descriptive link.[/quote]

This…I don’t see how a reasonable person could debate this…

If he was always snoopping into her shit frivolously, then fine, he is a jackass (still debatable whether or not he was breaking the law)…but if he is suspecting her of cheating, with good cause apparently, what is the issue with checking her email to verify?

Vegita’s advice to just “get a divorce and get it over with” if you suspect them of cheating is not good advice at all…what will be the grounds for your divorce? If you can’t prove an infidelity, you are going to lose half your shit…do you really want to give up half your shit? You can be a sucka if you want to, but count me out of that mess…[/quote]
Unfortunately the “good reason” defense doesn’t work. Let’s say a couple are still married and hubby suspects wifey is cheating. At what point is it reasonable for him to violate her right and expectation of privacy to confirm his suspicions? And what if he did log in to her Internet based email account (gmail/hotmail/etc.) and found nothing? Would that really be any different than a case of the police conducting an illegal search?

I don’t disagree that divorce is always the answer either. And I’d agree that it’s not wrong to try and prove it/disprove it. But, I’d suggest there have to be better, legal ways to handle it.

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[quote]blackhand wrote:

[quote]VTBalla34 wrote:

[quote]HeavyTriple wrote:
I agree that there should be privacy in the marriage, and I certainly don’t think I would be entitled to know every facet of a wife’s life or that I should even be able to read everything she writes. However, if I had good reason to suspect my wife was cheating, and she left her password in public view, I don’t see anything criminal about a little snooping. No need to hire a PI when I could just as easily do it for free. I’ll try to find a more descriptive link.[/quote]

This…I don’t see how a reasonable person could debate this…

If he was always snoopping into her shit frivolously, then fine, he is a jackass (still debatable whether or not he was breaking the law)…but if he is suspecting her of cheating, with good cause apparently, what is the issue with checking her email to verify?

Vegita’s advice to just “get a divorce and get it over with” if you suspect them of cheating is not good advice at all…what will be the grounds for your divorce? If you can’t prove an infidelity, you are going to lose half your shit…do you really want to give up half your shit? You can be a sucka if you want to, but count me out of that mess…[/quote]

Unfortunately the “good reason” defense doesn’t work. Let’s say a couple are still married and hubby suspects wifey is cheating. At what point is it reasonable for him to violate her right and expectation of privacy to confirm his suspicions? And what if he did log in to her Internet based email account (gmail/hotmail/etc.) and found nothing? Would that really be any different than a case of the police conducting an illegal search?

I don’t disagree that divorce is always the answer either. And I’d agree that it’s not wrong to try and prove it/disprove it. But, I’d suggest there have to be better, legal ways to handle it. [/quote]

Yeah I could have typed that a bit better…I was speaking to the moral definition of “right”, not the legal definition. It was in response to the well meaning but naive posters who were stating he should never have been in her e-mail and should divorce her if he suspects cheating and yada yada yada…

I did not weigh in on the legal meaning, because I don’t pretend to know privacy laws and the like, especially in Michigan…but I could easily be convinced that an e-mail address is shared property…

I was shocked when October Girl posted that it is a federal offense to open up your spouses mail, from your shared mailbox delivered to your shared house…

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[quote]TheBodyGuard wrote:

[quote]blackhand wrote:
Interesting perspective here.
http://ridethelightning.senseient.com/2010/12/yes-e-mail-snooping-on-a-spouse-is-usually-a-crime.html

I think this is the angle we’re going to see more of. Not the question of privacy, but of how the data is accessed. Especially when it involves corporate assets. Think of a company issued smartphone that the wife has gone and put something like FlexiSpy on. Or when hubby puts a keystroke logger on the wife’s corporate laptop.

[/quote]

Finally more information. I completely agree with the law, the prosecution and that it was a crime. And as to above comments, I don’t think your examples have any bearing at all. Whether you are married or not, you have a right to privacy. Whether it was a corporate computer or phone should be irrelevant. Putting sypware on any computer, even a shared computer, is over the top and a crime. And you should not be accessing your wife’s personal email without permission.

Now, I do think it’s getting slippery given that the passwords were in the open and unprotected but when you consider that he accessed her account 4 MONTHS AFTER SHE FILED FOR DIVORCE, no reasonable person could expect that he was within his rights to view her email.

Does this case ever happen for a married couple? No. It is however entirely relevant that this occurred as they were in the throes of divorce and she had every right to privacy of her personal communication? Absolutely.[/quote]
I mentioned the corporate asset example as I’ve seen it in the last few months with one of my clients (I work in information security). User had corporate laptop at home and had left it open and logged in. The suspicion was that when the user was away from the machine the spouse installed spyware on the system. Now this particular client was not interested in taking any legal action mainly because of the individual involved and the fact there wasn’t sensitive data on it. But, other clients would definitely pursue it very aggressively. I’ve actually just finished modifying a client’s security policy to acknowledge this kind of scenario.

My point is that I think we’ll see more legal action taken against snooping spouses and a driving force will be companies concerned over data loss.

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Interesting case study from New Jersey that I came across:

An illustrative case is White v. White, 344 N.J. Super. 211 (Ch. Div. 2001). The White case is the first reported New Jersey decision that addresses the admissibility of a husband’s “private” e-mail communications between himself and his girlfriend accessed by the wife’s computer expert. The court denied the husband’s motion to suppress the e-mails on the grounds that the wife’s action violated the New Jersey Wiretap Act. Finding that the e-mails had been stored, i.e., saved, “post-transmission” in the husband’s personal electronic file cabinet, the court held that the New Jersey Wiretap Act only applies to communications that are in transmission, and not to those that have been previously sent and saved.

The White court further held that the wife’s accessing the “private” e-mail communications of the husband did not constitute an invasion of privacy since the husband had no objective reasonable expectation thereof. The evidence showed that the e-mails were accessed from a computer maintained in a sunroom that the husband had been occupying during the parties’ in-house separation; that the wife and the parties’ three children were in and out of the room for various reasons, including the use of the computer; and that, while easy to do, the husband failed to employ any privacy protection mechanisms to prevent unwarranted intrusions into his personal files. The court also found that the wife’s arguable snooping into her husband’s personal affairs to learn information about his possible affair was not uncommon under such circumstances.