iii. Interception by Internet Service Provider

All Internet traffic to and from your machine flows, by definition, through the systems of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) – the ISP is your connection to the cloud. Your ISP, a renegade employee of your ISP, or someone working in cooperation with your ISP can intercept and read your email with ease. (This is why the fed targets ISPs for Carnivore implementations.)

Most ISPs are highly ethical and have the best interests of their customers at heart; however, there have been instances of less scrupulous ISPs taking advantage of the trust their users place in them. There was a case in San Francisco where an ISP was charged with multiple counts of intercepting email traffic between January and June 1998 from one of their business customers, namely Amazon.com, and forwarding the insider information contained therein to a competitor.

They settled the case with prosecutors in November 1999. There have been other instances of this type of behavior, but these cases are frequently settled with relatively little press. This is not just limited to small ISPs however; in the case of a large ISP it is much more likely that it is a renegade employee intercepting messages than the ISP itself, but the ease of interception is just the same.

Yet another more recent development in ISP-based message interception that has seen a lot of press lately is the federal government’s desire to utilize mechanisms such as the Carnivore system to intercept email messages and other Internet traffic. The primary complaint about a system such as this is that it intercepts all Internet traffic from all users of the ISP – it in essence intercepts and surveys everybody to find the one it is looking for. Concerns have been raised regarding what will happen with the balance of supposedly superfluous information.

iv. Interception by Email Provider

Email Provider

All email messages sent to and from your email account obviously have to travel through the systems of your email provider. In many cases, your email provider is the same entity as your ISP, but with the prevalence of free email providers and other email hosting services, many more people are using email accounts provided by someone other than their ISP. An email provider has very easy access (as easy as that of the ISP) to the content of your messages when those messages pass through their server.

v. Interception Points in a Corporate EnvironmentOffice

Email sent from an office computer must typically travel extensively across corporate networks and backbones prior to reaching the cloud itself (to reach which it may possibly also have to go through a commercial ISP.) While traveling across the corporate network, messages are effectively open to interception by many different people such as coworkers (in addition to people who may legitimately have an interest in auditing messages such as system administrators or security officers.) Corporations also typically act as email providers for their employees.

Some companies have relatively good control over their internal networks and have implemented controls and procedures to eliminate this sort of thing, but in many more companies (most companies, actually) it is as simple as running a packet sniffer on your machine and you are able to intercept all the traffic traveling across the corporate network or at least the local subnet.There are countless well-documented incidents of this type, covering the entire range from corporate spying to renegade employees acting alone.

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