There has been a lot of attention in the norwegian media about how the norwegian military has monitored network traffic on their own networks.
Connected to this network is also the royal family and the prime minister (as well as the other ministers)
Now, what is becoming the “breaking news” is that they monitor which websites is being visited. All this become known when they issued a warning to one user – for visiting some porn site. Here it becomes interesting, because they are now under investigation – it seems they might not have the permission to do this. In my opinion they only do their job – as I also understand it the reason they use this network is that it is considered secure. But it does seem like this could have been communicated better.
It is a lot of discussion if they read confidential email , and if they read the royal email or mail adressed to the prime minister(or others..). If they do spam and virus filtering as well, it would not be very difficult to have access to the raw email.
But – confidential email or information should never be exposed unprotected over any network (in my humble opinion). Confidential information should always be encrypted and protected. One really good way to do this is to use AD RMS – because it gives you control over how the information could be used as well as encryption.
You can read more about the news here (norwegian) : http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article3119612.ece
You can read more about AD RMS here: http://blog.crayon.no/blogs/ragnar/archive/2009/04/07/hvorfor-ad-rights-management-services.aspx