The power of law students

Let HP be a lesson to law students everywhere. If you play your cards right, you too can topple board executives and bring down large American companies. Lots of people in HP have been testifying before Congress. Well, not exactly testifying, since they're all invoking their Fifth Amendment constitutional right against self-incrimination. Well, CEO Hurd did say he accepted responsibility for what has happened, unlike Dunn who did the complete opposite and said, "I do not accept personal responsibility for what happened."

What is really interesting is what Representative Ed Whitfield said. "It would appear that Hewlett-Packard at the very highest levels relied on a document prepared by a law clerk hired by the private investigator saying that pretexting is legal." So on a law clerk's opinion commences an investigation that Representative John Dingell called "a plumber operation that would make Richard Nixon blush, were he still alive." And somehow, a number of high-powered lawyers oversaw operations based on this law clerk's memo. Ethics chief Hunsaker was one of those lawyers who advised the top people at HP that pretexting was legal.

Incidentally, the White House plumbers were called plumbers, because they were formed to stop leaks like the Pentagon Papers.

Some details also came out about how HP intended to spy on reporters. The investigators were using a commercial service named ReadNotify.com. How they tracked your e-mail seems really primitive. It sends HTML e-mail with a "web bug". A web bug is an invisible graphic, usually a 1x1 transparent GIF. A user would open up the e-mail and the image embedded is accessed from a server. The server will know the IP of who accessed the image. To track the e-mail would depend on someone forwarding the e-mail intact including the hidden image. If I just paraphrased the information in e-mail, ReadNotify couldn't track of to whom I sent the information. ReadNotify also claims that it uses a "combination of 36 techniques" that should work no matter what e-mail program and OS you use, but I really doubt it would work if I only read my e-mail in plaintext. I'm really curious as to their other techniques. I'm sure the EFF or other entities concerned with privacy will provide information as to how ReadNotify does it.

It should be noted that e-mail isn't like postal mail. It isn't private. It isn't sealed in an envelope going from one person to another person. E-mail is usually in plaintext, readable by anyone. There is no sealed envelope. If it's readily available, like the address information on the outside of the envelope, it's not private. The Internet was created to survive a nuclear attack, so it broadcasts everything. So when I send my e-mail to the server, anyone in between me and the server can see my e-mail and read it. It's like if I just wrote a letter and handed it to someone who hands it to someone else. Anyone along the journey could read it and passerby could read it. I wish I knew more about cyberlaw, so I could evaluate if there is an expectation of privacy. I'm sure there is a subjective expectation of privacy. Most individuals expect their e-mail to be private, because they don't know the voodoo of the Internet, including packet sniffers. The mythical reasonable person would probably also possess a expectation of privacy. Oh well, I just think I'll take up letter-writing. At least there, I know the contents of an envelope are a private and I don't have to do any thinking.