Violarea secretului corespondenţei vs. accesul ilegal la un sistem informatic

In this article, the author tries to clarify the relationship between the offence of violating the privacy of correspondence and the offence of unauthorized access to a computer system. The purpose is to test the scope of art. 302 of the Criminal Code in regard to electronic correspondence. Even if some would argue that the notion of correspondence stipulated in article 302 of the Criminal Code also covers electronic correspondence (e.g. an e-mail), the author concludes that only the offence provided under art. 360 of the Criminal Code is applicable. In this context, it is emphasized that the principle of lex certa prohibits the assimilation of the act consisting in opening of a correspondence with the act of accessing computer data. In the author’s point a view, any kind of electronic correspondence is in fact a communication which consists only in a set of computer data. Consequently, computer data cannot be opened but only accessed.