Married with Email

Being single, I have to laugh. Especially at my pet rock, who for now, isn't.

In Michigan, a law that was designed to be used against online hackers and identity thieves, is about to be tested for yet another application: the field of spousal 'privilege'.

A male accessed his wife's email account on their computer at home, and discovered -- by reading her emails -- that she was having an affair.

Cheaters tend to write the durndest things. Art Linkletter coulda had a helluva show on that, if he hadn't up and croaked in 2010.

What went down next I do not have at my finger tips, but the gist of it is:

1. She filed for divorce.

2. He was arrested/cited under the aforementioned Michigan law, for accessing his wife's email and learning what he learned.

3. He faces felony charges under this law.

Little other tidbits about it include the fact that prior to this incident, she had given her husband her password, and had asked him to check her email (unknown when this happened or why).

I'm not a lawyer and don't play one online, unless it's with nitwit online scammers of dubious antecedence and worse grasp of English tort of the jurisprudence or bakery kind. But I do know that access to personal information via the internet -- while wonderfully convenient -- is also not so wonderfully accessible to persons of odious intent. Even when you do what you can to protect yourself with the usual features (passwords, firewalls, a big slobbering cyberdawg that mauls cyberintruders), some six-fingered jackwagon at the store, a bank, a credit card company, and even with a local, state or federal government bureaubratic desk, can *oopsey daisy* and put your personal information up for grabs, by accident and/or design.

There are also moral and ethical considerations here, though in many venues, moral and ethical considerations are considered passe and oh so non-21st Century (like in Congress), but I digress.

I know a legal mind or two out there; what say you? How, and to what extent, can and potentially will this ripple through the legal community to affect separate but related aspects of internet usage, such as parental monitoring home-living kid's email, text messaging, etc? Who will soon (if not already) become the legal Gawdfaddah/Mutha of Internet Privacy?

Welcome to 2011.