The Crime of Wiretapping Your Spouse
A December article in the ABA Journal came to a fascinating and dangerous conclusion recently: they determined that spying on your spouse by putting an auto-forward on their email account (so that you automatically receive copies of emails sent to them) is a violation of the Federal Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act.
The idea that spying on your spouse is a crime (just like it would be if you spied on anyone else!) isn’t an entirely new one. Depending on what exactly you do to obtain information that your spouse has a right to keep private, it’s either illegal or ‘just’ inadmissible in court for you to:
- Secretly listen in on private phone conversations
- Obtain their password to social media, email, or other communications accounts and read their conversations
- Open mail addressed specifically to them
- Install a GPS tracker on them or their car
- Install key logging or similar spyware on their computer or other device
- Put a camera or audio recording device in a place that your spouse would reasonably have an expectation of privacy (even if you share that space with them!)
- And so on.
In the case in question, the husband and wife were married from 41 years when the wife discovered that her husband had been cheating on her. She accused him of cheating, and when his attorney asked for proof, she produced copies of emails send between her husband and several other women. He had no idea she had access to his email account, and accused her of illegal email forwarding.
The divorce went mostly her way due to the evidence that he had cheated — but after the divorce was over, he sued her in Federal court and appealed the divorce judgment pending the outcome of the suit. The Federal court declared his allegations amounted to an accusation that she had violated the Federal Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act
While that suit has yet to be completed, so the end result is still unknown, the takeaway here is that you shouldn’t get into your spouse’s email without their permission — and you particularly should not set up a mechanism by which you will automatically be given access to their email in an ongoing fashion (such as an email forward). The former is unethical and sometimes illegal; the latter is always illegal, and in a big way, and will get your evidence thrown out in court, you thrown in jail, or both.
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