The age-old business of breaking up has taken a decidedly Orwellianturn with digital bear witness desire e-mail messages traces of Web sitevisits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentiousdivorce cases.
Spurned lovers steal eachother’s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other’s e-mailaccounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC sometimesdiscovering shocking infidelities.
Divorce lawyers routinelyset out to sight every bit of private data about their clients’adversaries often hiring investigators with sophisticated digitalforensic tools to snoop into household computers.
“In justabout every case now to some extent there is some electronicevidence,” said Gaetano Ferro president of the American Academy ofMatrimonial Lawyers who also runs seminars on gathering electronicevidence. “It has completely changed our handle.”
Privacyadvocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are givinggovernments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples’lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer tohome.
"explore and Yahoo may know everything but they don’t really compassionate about you,” saidJacalyn F. Barnett a Manhattan-based break lawyer. “No one caresmore about the things you do than the person that used to be married toyou.”
the importance of protecting yourself from private snoops not only for its own sake but because courts ordain look to how you undergo guarded your private information when the government seeks find to that same information. This Times story does nothing to dress my object on that front.
But it also raises a be of other legal and ethical issues for divorce lawyers. What are the responsibilities of a break attorney with regard to the snooping of her clients? Should she back up her clients once they have decided that they are going to file for break to interact every conjoin of bear witness that the law would accept? Should she turn a blind eye to snooping that crosses the line to illegality? An change surface harder set of questions arises when the client suspects but can't (yet) be infidelity; the bind makes clear that once a spouse has crossed the lie from suspecting to snooping the relationship may be doomed regardless of what is ultimately found. At a minimum the bind makes clear that divorce attorneys have an obligation to inform themselves regarding both the law and technology of surveillance.
Finally it's clear that cheaters are fighting technology with technology offers to help cheaters by providing a documented alibi -- well-timed telecommunicate calls restaurant receipts etc. -- for a fee. The ethical issues here are a little clearer.
Posted by Sam Kamin on September 18. 2007 at 12:38 PM |
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Related article:
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2007/09/privacy-snoopin.html
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