Re: Employer Probing Precedents?

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

(I've purged the four accumulated names off the cc: list. I urge other to
do the same, as the headers are getting clogged up, and people are often
getting two copies.)


At 10:59 PM 12/28/95, Mike McNally wrote:

>Another vaguely-related concept is that of tenants' rights to a degree
>of security in rental property.

Actually, tenants have nearly absolute rights of privacy. Landlords cannot
enter the premises whenever they wish, conduct bed checks, sniff for
marijuana, etc.

However, landlords are also not held liable (in most cases) for the illegal
acts of tenants. (Obvious exceptions include recent developments with
"crack house" laws, or where the tenants are using a house as a base of
operations, such as shooting from windows...and even then the landlord's
responsibility is to cooperate with law enforcement: he is not liable for
the shootings, nor for anything else that he could not have reasonably
known about or controlled.)

Ditto for hotel owners. I wrote a long essay for the Cyberia list using
these examples as jumping off points for a view of law in cyberspace.
Basically, that ISPs be treated as hotel owners. Not liable for the
misdeeds of customers in the  "rooms" (in realspace hotels, or in
cyberspace).

However, corporations aren't given the luxury of disassociating themselves
from the actions of their employees. (Contract workers are a further issue,
and the issue of whether they supply their own tools/computers, workspace,
etc., enters in.)

I maintain that my employees are beholden to me as to what they run on
their computers. They can always choose not to work for me. (And the same
applies to hotels, actually. Were a hotel to have stringent rules on
in-room behavior, such as the YMCAs and religious retreat hotels have, then
customers have little right to complain about bed checks, mixed sex bans,
etc. That most hotels have no such rules says more about where the
Schelling points are than it does about the efficacy of rules and laws.


>Though the ownership==control equation works sometimes, and is
>appealing to reason, I don't think things are always so simple.

Nor do I think things are always simple. But it pays to think about
proposed laws from a perspective of maximizing personal choice. (The choice
of the owner of a hotel, or computer, or car, to establish the basis for
trading use of his property for other considerations.)

--Tim May


We got computers, we're tapping phone lines.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."