Pat (as always) raises a lot of good questions in his response to this post.

I think there are a couple of things to consider when talking about a
privately owned network, one that has no business purposes whatsoever and is
used by multiple members within a family for Internet access including
e-mail and other forms of messaging/communications.

While there is a lot of truth in the scenario presented by Pat - someone
pays for it, someone sets up all of the accounts and administers it, someone
installs the firewall and virus software, etc... and typically that person
is the "Controller of All Things" having the privileges, authority, and
access rights to make changes to the system. 

The whole concept of "rights" covers a very broad spectrum, including:
Natural, Legal, Claim, Liberty, Positive and Negative Rights.  There are
also Individual, Group, Political, Civil, Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights. However 'access rights' and 'rights to access' are a bit different. 

Just because the "IT Alpha Member" of a family has access rights to all user
accounts doesn't automatically grant them the right to exercise that ability
without first informing others of their intention to do so.  In the case of
a Parent/Minor Child relationship, you may feel you have certain obligations
to do certain things, but for the most part, these are moral issues.  In the
case of Spouse/Partner relationships, there is a different arrangement,
including a certain level of trust which should prevent such activities,
even though as the Administrator you MAY have the abilities.  

Also, while the example Pat provided is true for ISP based e-mail accounts,
that one system admin has access to the Primary account and others are
'child' accounts below that, this is not true of web based e-mail accounts,
such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail and others. Each user has unique accounts,
some content is stored locally, and some is stored with the provider.  But
ONLY the user can access these accounts unless they have left the passwords
written down somewhere.

The case in question is one where the spouse had written their passwords
down and left them in a book near the computer- and while the husband may
not have had to pry open a locked drawer, etc to access them, he KNEW he was
'snooping' at minimum to look in the book to find them.  As for it being
"his network", in a marriage there are a lot more "theirs" when it comes to
common property items like cable accounts, networks, phone accounts, etc
than "his" or "hers"... few husbands and wives have multiple cable or
network accounts =)

And as a last thought here, this was a Windows PC from everything I read...
and as mentioned by Pat, sad but true...defeating a Windows login isn't
rocket science.  Now if it were a Mac operating under an Apple OS, different
story.  There is an Administrator account, but each user has the ability to
set their own password and change it as often as they like, and within each
account, users have the ability to set access rights for each folder they
have information stored in... and the Admin has NO ACCESS PRIVILEGES to
these folders once a user sets them to private.  The only thing an Admin can
do if a user has set folders to private and setup their own password is
delete the account/user... which is why the once minor children in our house
were discouraged from securing their own accounts or folders.  But once they
hit 18, all bets were off... but they were encouraged to write the passwords
down and put them somewhere they KNEW they could find them.

An Apple Admin CAN also setup "Shared Folders" such as those used for a
common music, photo or video library or an address book that all users can
access, which is a common practice.  

This whole case is making a lot more noise than it should be making, mainly
because it's touched on an nerve and there is an attempt to apply a law that
was intended for other purposes... but when it comes to what families do to
manage their own information, whether it's on a computer, a cell phone, a
bank account or whatever the issues run much deeper than legal, they lean
towards moral and ethical issues and TRUST.

Larry
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