ABSTRACT
Aside from the content of e-mail communications, there are four major concerns regarding electronic communication: (a) ensuring confidentiality (where necessary); (b) ensuring that the person an e-mail appears to have come from actually
sent it (‘authentication’); (c) ensuring the content of the e-mail cannot be tampered with during
transmission (‘integrity’); and (d) ensuring the sender cannot deny sending the e-mail (‘non-repudiation’). E-mail may be interfered with en route in the same way that documents sent by post may be interfered with. Once an e-mail is ‘sent’ it passes from one computer to another until it reaches the computer of the recipient. The route each e-mail follows is determined by ‘router’ computers, and depends on the amount of e-mail traffic at the time. For example, an e-mail sent from Melbourne to Sydney may bounce via the Philippines or the US. There is no technical barrier to prevent computers from scanning all the e-mails that pass through them en route to their intended recipient. There are software programs that can search across e-mails for key words, and copy these to an electronic sub-folder, which can be viewed at any time by the user of that computer.
