So Wells Fargo no longer has a security interest in two properties because it was not monitoring its mail well enough.

FORBES: Wells Fargo Ignores Mail Loses Security Interests

Corporate computers are fair game for snooping in the U.S. (Some European countries have stricter privacy rules.) So in-house spooks can divert copies of incoming and outgoing e-mail to a separate file for monitoring.

FORBES: Get Hunt and Liddy on the Phone

However, today's UKSA monitoring paper states that, while the Daily Mail quoted the correct number of specific offences of disorder, their story "did not give the numbers of the other offences" connected to the rioting.

BBC: Watchdog v newshound

The system, called key-escrow, would give police and other law enforcement bodies wide-ranging powers to intercept e-mail, read confidential documents and tap into systems, without monitoring by the courts.

BBC: Security and law enforcement: the government view

Such monitoring is increasingly useful, because of the growing use of e-mail, faxes and the Internet by businesses to communicate.

ECONOMIST: Those perfidious Anglo spies

Virus-monitoring company MessageLabs said it had detected and stopped 155, 528 e-mail viruses by the end of November - a rate of one every three minutes.

BBC: Kournikova computer virus hits hard

The aspiration of the company is to build a series of technologies that encompasses an electronic monitoring and alert engine for activity that occurs not only on its own e-mail servers, but also on third party solutions including AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and text messaging, and eventually on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, too.

FORBES: CES update: Can Mousemail.com make the Internet a safer place for children?