Is accessing your spouse’s email account hacking?

People don’t email each other things they would want to be in public, otherwise they would have put it on a blog or public forum. Quite intimate conversations can be had over email. They may want to vent their anger about their husband or say something they know their husband will disagree with while avoiding an argument. People who don’t understand technology that well could send personal details that they shouldn’t. People conduct sales and banking over the Internet and the site will send reminders over email. Many sites send registration confirmation in emails that includes the actual password. You should ask permission before you read anything potentially sensitive.

Being husband and wife doesn’t mean you want to share every single facet of your identity. A spouse isn’t completely trustworthy, they can turn abusive, they can secretly be manipulating you or pulling some kind of financial fraud against you. You always need things outside your marriage that you can use if it fails.

Quite apart from that, when you get married you are still your own person, you can’t let someone completely erode who you are. Your online presence should always be your own property because the Internet is for having a different identity, being anonymous, doing things you can’t do in the offline world. To interfere with someone’s online presence is to have too much control over them.

An email is very easy to fake. Emails can be altered or deleted before or after being sent. They can be drafted and then not sent. They can be written sent without the person’s permission by someone else with access to their account. Email accounts aren’t that difficult to hack into. The recipient could be a fake account and the conversation be with an imaginary person. There is virtually no way to prove either person’s account belongs to the person it is alleged to belong to. Because it is typed, there is no way to tell someone’s identity from their handwriting or from who has been touching the paper.

At the time he accessed the information, they were already in discord if he suspected his wife was having an affair. They will already have been acting out of character, their behaviour would have been suspicious, they would start acting hostile towards each other. In this situation they are not in a position where they can trust each other. Therefore they should not be sharing information that they can be used to hurt each other, and accessing such information should be seen as a threat.

There is no proof that he didn’t just log in and write the email exchange himself.

She had filed for divorce months earlier, they weren’t ‘really’ married anymore and as such he invaded a half-stranger’s privacy by hacking into her A/C.

“According to prosecutors, Leon walker broke into his wife’s account several months after she filed for divorce. clara walker said her husband installed a tracking device that allowed him to track her e-mail activity. leon walker faces up to five years in prison if convicted. Locate history files, websites visited, searches e-mail history. memory bye. see you hide from me now, little man.
Spying on spouses is nothing new, but some snooping husbands and wives may not realize that in this new age of technology, peeking in the wrong places can actually be illegal. “

[[http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40820892]]

Leon Walker went through his wife’s notebook to get her password and then he logged onto her email account.

He never asked if he could read her emails or if he could know her password; he stole it and he logged into her account; possibly to get out of paying alimony after the divorce(which she had filed for several months prior to Leon’s activity).

“Walker claims she kept her passwords on a piece of paper beside the computer, and he was well within his rights to log into her account. Prosecutors have a different take: they say Walker’s spying took place months after she filed for divorce, which was granted this month. What’s more, Walker’s ex testified that he had installed a device on their computer to keep track of her email activity.”

[[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/28/leon-walker_n_802020.html]]
[[http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40820892]]
[[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/27/leon-walker-wifes-email_n_801679.html]]

Even though you have said your marriage vows and promised to love and trust each other till eternity, the fact still remains that you and your spouse are two different people with two different lives. Even though your spouse may have given you his or her password, you should still understand that it is your spouse’s “personal” e-mail account and should remain personal- meaning your spouse should be the only one accessing it. Since it is your spouse’s e-mail account and you and your spouse are not the same person, accessing your spouse’s e-mail account without your spouse’s knowledge is synonymous to hacking, and therefore should be considered as a violation of privacy.

If he suspected this, he should have reported it to the police and they would have accessed the information. Anyone can claim to be suspicious about someone else’s activity in order to access information about them. You can’t intrude on other people’s property because of suspicion, you shouldn’t be able to access their computers without permission.

As someone with reason to be extremely biased against her, he should have been the last person to have access to her private information. He could have rewritten, fabricated or deleted pertinent information.

Counterargument: He could warn the first husband without snooping around his wife’s email account.

If his wife was sending information that she wouldn’t want him to know about, she obviously either trusted him not to read the emails or didn’t think he had access. He should have asked for specific permission for what he knew to be potentially sensitive information. She may not even understand that she wasn’t supposed to give other people her password – in which case, her security is breached and he, as someone with more understanding of technology, should be helping her.

While it should not have incurred the maximum penalty and maybe shouldn’t have been classified as ‘hacking’, it still should be considered an offense. The law concerning the use of digital technology still isn’t completely clear and many issues still need to be resolved. For instance, many games no longer available in stores aren’t legal to emulate. Breaching someone’s privacy online should be an offense – I do not want to think that other people, even those close to me, are reading through my emails without my permission!