Charter Watcher

Charter wiretapping may be a “five-year felony”

PrivacyDigest.com has an interesting article up today suggesting that individual sysadmins and other employees at Charter Communications who participate in the wiretapping program may themselves be committing felonies! I wonder if that means that Ted Schremp could go to jail too?

From the article:

These schemes all seem to violate the Wiretap Act, a federal statute banning eavesdropping that comes with criminal and civil penalties. That law has some exceptions for service providers to monitor content, but only when necessary to deliver service, or to protect the company’s “rights and property.”

In fact, Ohm thinks network system administrators could themselves be in legal trouble, just for following orders from their bosses to install monitoring devices.

“Not only is this a five-year felony, it also has individual accountability,” Ohm said. “The sys admin could be sued individually and prosecuted individually If you are asked by your manager to go and do this kind of monitoring, you yourself may be legally exposed.”

What about call center workers? Could they all pick up jail time for repeating the company line on the matter too?

The legality of Charter’s snooping is not really even all that questionable. Most of the legal challenges are based on a law from 1984. In order for these monitoring programs to be legal we all have to believe that cable companies took 24 years to finally get around to reading that law and discovering that they could have been snooping on you all along!

Then again, given the intelligence displayed by the Charter management team such a thing just might be possible.