Family Law

The age-old business of breaking up has taken a decidedly Orwellian turn, with digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases.

Spurned lovers steal each other?s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other?s e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities.

Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients? adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.

?In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,? said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. ?It has completely changed our field.?

Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples? lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.

?Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don?t really care about you,? said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. ?No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you.?

Most of these stories do not end amicably. This year, a technology consultant from the Philadelphia area, who did not want his name used because he has a teenage son, strongly suspected his wife was having an affair. Instead of confronting her, the husband installed a $49 program called PC Pandora on her computer, a laptop he had purchased.

The program surreptitiously took snapshots of her screen every 15 seconds and e-mailed them to him. Soon he had a comprehensive overview of the sites she visited and the instant messages she was sending. Since the program captured her passwords, the husband was also able to get access to and print all the e-mail messages his wife had received and sent over the previous year.

What he discovered ended his marriage. For 11 months, he said, she had been seeing another man ? the parent of one of their son?s classmates at a private school outside Philadelphia. The husband said they were not only arranging meetings but also posting explicit photos of themselves on the Web and soliciting sex with other couples.

The husband, who like others in this article was reached through his lawyer, said the decision to invade his wife?s privacy was not an easy one. ?If I were to tell you I have a pure ethical conscience over what I did, I?d be lying,? he said. But he also pointed to companies that have Internet policies giving them the right to read employee e-mail messages. ?When you?re in a relationship like a marriage, which is emotional as well as, candidly, a business, I think you can look at it in the same way,? he said.

When considering invading their spouse?s privacy, husbands and wives cite an overriding desire to find out some secret. One woman described sensing last year that her husband, a Manhattan surgeon, was distant and overly obsessed with his BlackBerry.

Read it all at The New York Times.