Man gets 4 years in prison for spying on wife's email

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Spying on lover's e-mail? Monitoring may be illegal
Austin police have charged two recently with activity.
By Tony Plohetski
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Shawn Macleod wanted to know where his estranged wife was going on the Internet and what she was writing in e-mails, investigators said, so he secretly installed a program called SpyRecon on her computer that sent him electronic logs with the sites she had visited and messages she had sent. His spying resulted in a four-year prison sentence.

Software programs created to monitor computer activity have grown in popularity in recent years as parents have sought ways to prevent children from accessing adult Web sites or e-mailing possible predators and as businesses have tried to curtail the time employees spend on the Internet when they are at work. Others, too, have found a use for the software: Scorned lovers can track where their spouses or partners go online, whom they are e-mailing and what they are saying — all possibly in violation of the law.

Austin police considered Macleod's actions tantamount to illegal wiretapping and charged him with unlawful interception of electronic communication, a second-degree felony that can carry a 20-year sentence. Macleod pleaded guilty in May. "It's pretty alarming," said Macleod's attorney, Johnny Urrutia. Urrutia said he would be surprised if his client knew that what he was doing was against the law.

Doug Fowler, president of SpectorSoft Corp., which manufactures an Internet monitoring program called eBlaster, said law enforcement agencies nationwide have in recent months sought company records during criminal investigations, hoping the documents would show who installed the software on victims' computers...

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/11/13/1113spy.html