LAWSUIT, Commissioner Doolin on Steinbach v. Does 1-3

I sent Commissioner Patrick Doolin some questions about Steinbach's lawsuit against three John Does for accessing her village email account without her permission.

On July 7 Commissioner Steinbach learned someone--presumably from village staff--had accessed her village email account without her permission and forwarded emails to Mayor Calderone. She detected this by looking in her sent folder and seeing emails that were forwarded by someone other than herself.

Can you please check your sent item folders and see if the same thing has happened to your email account?

Has the village provided you with written guidelines explaining what level of privacy you can expect for your accounts?

Do you have any reason to believe anyone has accessed your account improperly?

Did Commissioner Steinbach contact you to see if you also suffered the same intrusion as her before she filed her lawsuit?

Doolin's response:

I have all email(s) sent to me at my pdoolin [circled "a"] forestpark.net address forwarded to my personal AOL account. My understanding is that you must be on/using a computer terminal at village hall to check email directly on your village account. As this is rather impractical and response to emails would be less than timely if I had to drive to village hall to check mail, I had Craig Lundt, our IT manager, set up a forwarding system to my personal account. As such I have been unable to determine whether any of my email has been intercepted and forwarded to others.

I have never been given, nor am I aware of any no right to privacy policy in regard to my Forest Park email account. That said, I have never accessed my email from a village computer. If there is some type of disclaimer attached to the system that is displayed upon log in, I would have never seen it.

I have no knowledge of anyone intercepting my email and forwarding it to the Mayor or any others, however, if this has in fact happened to Commissioner Steinbach, it would not be a surprise to me if the same has happened with my mail.

Commissioner Steinbach did not inform me of this alleged activity nor did she question whether it was happening to me prior to the filing of her lawsuit. I first heard about it on Saturday 08/05 from my wife who read it on your blog.