Hacker Crackdown, page 328 by Bruce Sterling
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and the Privacy Protection Act of 1980. The Secret Service denied they were legally or morally responsible for seizing the work of a publisher. They claimed that (1) Jackson's gaming "books" weren't real books anyhow, and (2) the Secret Service didn't realize SJG Inc was a "publisher" when they raided his offices, and (3) the books only vanished by accident because they merely happened to be inside the computers the agents were appropriating.
The Secret Service also denied any wrongdoing in reading and erasing all the supposedly "private" e-mail inside Jackson's seized board, Illuminati. The USSS attorneys claimed the seizure did not violate the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, because they weren't actually "intercepting" electronic mail that was moving on a wire, but only electronic mail that was quietly sitting on a disk inside Jackson's computer. They also claimed that USSS agents hadn't read any of the private mail on Illuminati; and anyway, even supposing that they had, they were allowed to do that by the subpoena.
The Jackson case became even more peculiar when the Secret Service attorneys went so far as to allege that the federal raid against the gaming company had actually IMPROVED JACKSON'S BUSINESS thanks to the ensuing nationwide publicity.
It was a long and rather involved trial. The judge seemed most perturbed, not by the arcane matters of electronic law, but by the fact that the Secret Service could have avoided almost all the consequent trouble simply by giving Jackson his computers back in short order. The Secret Service easily could have looked at everything in Jackson's computers, recorded everything, and given the machinery back, and there would have been no major scandal or federal court suit. On the contrary, everybody simply would have had a good laugh. Unfortunately, it appeared that this idea had never entered the heads of the Chicago-based investigators. They seemed to have concluded unilaterally, and without due course of law, that the world would be better of