[cromwellian]

Taken to an extreme, this idea of applying wiretapping law to federated services seems to be a danger to open systems. A closed messaging system can get all users, both senders and recipients, to agree to whatever is needed to make the system work (e.g. if they need to examine the content and not just the envelope)

However, when you have federation, two different sets of users on two different services may have agreed to differing terms. Applying terms like "interception" in these cases also seems strange.

It's bad enough that silos and vertical integration seem to be winning over the internet of old, but to have the legal system create a situation in which the open systems are much more risky to run seems to be a bad precedent.

(I also have to wonder who is really behind these cases. It's not very plausible that any of the plantiffs are really being harmed by automated ad serving, and then there's the whole Scroogled campaign...as Arsenio Hall used to say...things that make you go hmmmmm.)