[Gllug] Alternatives to googlemail

[Bernard Peek]

On 30/05/11 12:06, Nix wrote:
> On 30 May 2011, Steve Parker spake thusly:
>
>> On 29/05/11 11:06, Daniel Mang wrote:
>>> I am looking into the possibility of finally transferring my email
>>> away from google (for some reasons see
>>> http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html).
>> IANAL, and I certainly don't know US law, but the Regulation of
>> Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) here in the UK gives the UK government
>> authority to read your email, and to force you to decrypt your
>> encrypted email for them on demand,
> I've wondered for a while. Suppose that the UK govt gets nobbled by a
> big company, call it X (which would *never* happen), and they force a
> few people working on their competitor Y's secret sauce to open their
> email, and ban them from talking about it to their employers.
>
> Y, when it inevitably finds out, would be narked at this and could
> reasonably rumble about disciplinary procedures.

Y wouldn't be able to do a thing, they couldn't even order their
employees to stop doing the monitoring. An employer may not order an
employee to break the law.

In practice the government can do what it wants unless it pisses off
enough people to either vote it out of office or mount a revolution.

>  I wonder if 'just doing
> what the law obliged me to and what the nice men in police uniforms
> said' would be a defence in this case?
That would be difficult to do because they wouldn't be allowed to
discuss the interception with their management. And if their manager
mentions the interception to the person doing it then the manager is
breaking the law and could get two years. It would be illegal for Y to
do anything to stop the interception, or complain about it.


> (I also suspect that if your
> employer Y really tries to bring the hammer down on you for something
> like this over which you had no control at all, that you're better off
> working somewhere else anyway. But probably not X. They're demonstrably
> unethical bastards too.)
>


-- 
Bernard Peek
bap at shrdlu.com

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