IM Alert

Julian Sanchez | April 13, 2004

Via Slashdot comes a report of a New Hampshire Superior Court ruling holding that under the state's "two-party consent" wiretap statutes, the fairly routine practice of logging an IM chat may be as illegal as surreptitiously recording a phone conversation. Or as the author of the piece linked above somewhat melodramatically puts it:

You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail.