[uug] Wiretapping at BYU

[Jonathan Wilson]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 03:39:24PM -0700, Andrew McNabb wrote:
> Some of you may have received a phishing email yesterday which was
> directed to people in the CS Department.  I got one, too, and as a joke,
> I sent the attached message to the system list.  Most people realized I
> was joking, and one person (I won't name names) temporarily freaked out
> a little, but in the end everyone had fun.
> 
> Two and a half hours later, I got a phone call from David from Network
> Security.  He asked me if I had sent out my password as a response to
> the phishing attack, and I explained that I had sent a joke message.
> Then I asked how he knew about the message.
> 
> It turns out that BYU has an expensive system that does low-level
> wiretapping.  Something in the email had triggered their filter, so
> David read my email and called me about it.  He didn't give me any
> specifics, but it sounds like it's either all low-level traffic or all
> emails that get forwarded to their wiretapping system for filtering.  He
> mentioned that they have vague plans to let people know what they're
> doing, but it sounds like they don't have this posted anywhere.
> 
> I have no clue what expressions they're searching for, or how they deal
> with what they read.  They obviously didn't realize that I was joking in
> this case.  Now I'm worried that there might be other situations where
> they take things out of context and have no sense of humor.  What can I
> do to protect myself from being wrongly accused because of the
> misinterpreted contents of any future email?
> 
> I know that BYU has some legal rights to monitor its network, but what
> are the limits?  They aren't supposed to read everyone's emails, are
> they?  David gave me the email address of his boss <trevoro at byu.edu> and
> I plan on emailing him to ask some of these questions.
> 

Coincidence? I think not...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/25/cryptome_dmca_takedown/

"Microsoft's wiretap guide goes online, security site goes offline"

-- 
Jonathan Wilson
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