Another object lesson in how your rights to privacy stop when litigation begins:
High-tech surveillance tactics are now commonplace in divorce cases, changing the nature of matrimonial law practice.
Soon-to-be-divorced spouses routinely steal each other’s BlackBerries and install snooping software on each other’s computers. This not only enables them to read each other’s e-mail but to monitor, in 15-second increments, what a perhaps-erring marital partner is doing on the Internet, reports the New York Times. What they can’t find out, their divorce lawyers perhaps can by hiring even more technologically sophisticated private detectives.
“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” says Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “It has completely changed our field.”
Amusingly or not, the one area where the law is ferocious in responding to adversaries’ invasions of each others’ privacy is that of clients’ communications with their lawyers — mustn’t infringe on the lawyer-client privilege, after all. (Martha Neil, “Divorce Practice Now a Surveillance War”, ABA Journal, Sept. 18).
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