🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <EMCGUIRE.92Nov11161022@fuller.intellection.com> emcguire@intellection.com (Ed McGuire) writes:
>Telephone companies are not required to listen in on conversations and
>disconnecting circuits which are carrying illegal ones.  In fact they
>are prohibited from monitoring conversations, with few exceptions.

Actually, they routinely monitor conversations for "signal quality"
checking, last I heard.  (Of course, they have neither the manpower nor
the inclination to monitor more than a tiny fraction of them.)  I think
you're confusing authority to monitor with authority to disclose.  The
phone company can listen all it wants; it just can't tell anyone else
what it hears.  Things heard during signal-quality monitoring are supposed
to go in one ear and out the other.

>Why should that be any different for me?

Because the phone company is a "common carrier", and you are not.  It
would make sense for Usenet and similar entities to be common carriers,
but nothing short of a court decision would establish that.  Until that
happens, nobody knows quite what your legal status is.  (The recent
Compuserve case points in the right direction, but doesn't settle all
the angles by any means.)
-- 
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry