Someone came to my office today and asked me about a "friend" that was reading the email (yahoo acct) of a former girlfriend, fishing for information about some missing/unreturned property. The person did send a few emails using the acct and read many of the emails.
The person asked me:
Could her friend get caught? said was using public a Wifi to access the yahoo acct.
Is there a crime being committed? If so, is it a civil crime?
I told her that while anything is possible, an unsecure wifi connection makes you pretty anonymous.
I'm not sure about the legality issue, but it screams of "Stalking" and/or "identity theft" and/or "theft of service", but I'm not a lawyer... And if he is sending emails, he better delete them from 'Sent'.
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depends where you are as to your legal framework... in the uk 'accessing a system which you do no have permission to do so' is an offence
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Radimus, send me a pm and I will take a look at this for you if you want. I prefer not to get into serious legal advice in an open forum like this.
Doug
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I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard the US laws that pertain to e-mail are the same as for regular snail mail. Intercepting & reading e-mail is like stealing regular mail as far as the law is concerned.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard the US laws that pertain to e-mail are the same as for regular snail mail. Intercepting & reading e-mail is like stealing regular mail as far as the law is concerned.
I don't think so. I believe that it is a federal crime to steal/open/read regular mail.
As usual :) psionandy is probably closest to the truth about e-mail.
It's definitely quite illegal, as it can be seen as reading stuff from another persons computer. That it's "merely" an account and if he got her password with her consent might be seen as extenuating circumstances, but it's most definitely a crime.
I'm not really sure if I should write this, but here goes:
I'm pretty sure this is done today in police investigations, because it would be quite easy to track down people even though they're using "unsecured wifi access".
If the "friend" uses the public wifi for any personal stuff, like reading his own mail, connecting to an IM system or something similar, the investigating party could confirm that he was the one who read "her" e-mail, since I'm sure that at least yahoo saves at the very least the IP of the last couple of logins.
Police agencies have probably got some kind of access to multiple databases on the net with this kind of information, so as soon as an investigation is ongoing, they can do a trace.
They might not be able to use it for a crime as tiny as this, but in bigger investigations I believe they use it.
Then again, people can be really stupid when you least expect it, so it might not exist after all.
Edit: I forgot that you live in the US. It's most definitely done today. Probably even for misdemeanors.
I don't know if it's illegal or not, but it is certainly immoral and wrong. Your friend is bordering on stalking and should stop. He should also get some psychological help b/c what he'd doing is not healthy. Tell him to move on.
If you reverse the roles you'll see what I mean. If this asswipe was using your email and spying on you, and you found out, how would you feel? You would feel violated. Imagine how a woman would feel. Imagine how you would feel if someone did that to your wife.
I explained that to the person that came in, and that "Stalking" was the first thing that came to my mind about it.
She assured me that it was all in regards to recovering property that the former GF left with (engagement ring and such) and his efforts was not to harass her beyond that goal.
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This person should use the legal system and do things the right way, or at the very least, stop sneaking around like a scumbag and be upfront and direct. This reminds me of a rash of problems we had at work that was all caused by one disgruntled employee who went around putting candy bars in employee's cars' gas tanks and breaking their car windows when he got into disputes b/c he was too big of a pussy to confront everyone directly. Needless to say, he was let go by our boss, who is a fair man. Later, a fair employee confronted this bastard man to man and gave him what he had coming. This is why your friend should always handle their business in a proper manner instead of sneaking around.
It's still (probably) a crime. If he wants the ring back - Check if the law is on his side, and get a police to do the work.
I'm guessing that you can't get a gift back from the recipient, but I might be wrong (if it's a family heirloom or something).
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Actually, I'm sorta curious about this and have always wondered.
