E-mail Privacy

[Carl M. Kadie]

Here are some legal considerations (disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer):

At least for conventional letters, the sender owns the copyright, but
the recipient owns the letter. If e-mail is to be given the same
status as conventional mail, the note (and its backups) belong to the
person who was fired.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1976 protects e-mail.
According to some experts (see the current IEEE Software), e-mail
privacy can be legally violated if notice is given (whether such
a violation is ethical is a different question.) In your case, no
notice was given, so you might be in violation of the ECPA.

Also, a person who works for a public university has a constitutional
right to privacy even with respect to school property. [From the ACLU
handbook on the Rights of Teachers:]

"An anonymous cartoon had appeared in a local newspaper ridiculing the
financial and personnel policies of the Fair Lawn, New Jersey, Board
of Education by depicting the board members a poker players,
apparently gambling away employees' salaries and jobs. Suspecting the
guidance counselor as the offending cartoonist, a board member entered
the guidance counselor's school at night, found a janitor with a pass
key, directed him to unlock the door to the guidance counselor's
suite, and observing a slightly opened drawer in the guidance
counselor's disk, pulled it completely open, revealing copies of the
cartoon. The court ruled that this action violated the guidance
counselor's Fourth Amendment rights."

The worst thing that could happen is that the e-mail is retrieved and
then a new policy is set up to retro-justify the retrieval (i.e. "The
boss can look at anyone's email for any reason at any time.")

- Carl

references: Excerpts from the ECPA of 1986 are available via anonymous
ftp from eff.org as file academic/ecpa.1986 (also see file academic/README).
-- 
Carl Kadie -- kadie at cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign