From AP:

The family of a Marine killed in Iraq is pleading with Internet giant Yahoo! for access to his e-mail account, which the company says is off-limits under its privacy policy.

Lance Cpl. Justin M. Ellsworth, 20, was killed by a roadside bomb on Nov. 13 during a foot patrol in Al Anbar province. The family wants the complete e-mail file that Justin maintained, including notes to and from others.

“I want to be able to remember him in his words. I know he thought he was doing what he needed to do. I want to have that for the future,” said John Ellsworth, Justin’s father. “It’s the last thing I have of my son.”

But without the account’s password, the request has been repeatedly denied. In addition, Yahoo! policy calls for erasing all accounts that are inactive for 90 days. Yahoo! also maintains that all users agree at sign-up that rights to a member’s ID or contents within an account terminate upon death…

You have to feel for the family, but Yahoo! is right to protect the Marine’s privacy and uphold the user agreement. Maybe what the company should do in the future is offer a special option for military users allowing release of their accounts in case of death? Heated debate on FreeRepublic here.

Update: Some feedback pro and con…

On the anti-Yahoo! side, the always thoughtful Jeff Harrell writes:

Michelle, he was their son. If these were paper letters in a shoebox, would you be arguing that they should be burned? Of course not. You’d be taking up a collection from your readers to pay for the shipping. He was their son, and these are his letters. They should go back to his family.

I mean, set aside all the family stuff just for a minute. These letters are history. So much of what we know about wars past comes from letters written by and to soldiers. To consign them to the memory hole over concerns about privacy … please…

On the pro-Yahoo! side, reader Naomi Young writes:

This is tragic BUT ISPs probably aren’t going to change their policies. With identity theft so rife, it would be too easy for imposters to hack accounts.

The answer is that each of us should, along with other wills, funeral plans, etc., leave a list of passwords with our next of kin or family lawyer. (You can always encode them and separately leave instructions on how they should be decoded.)

This has the added benefit of allowing our families to notify mailing lists or email correspondents of our deaths.

It is a problem, but the answer is personal action, not another regulation.

Good advice no matter where you come down on this case.

On a different note, a Marine writes in:

FYI, please do not call Marines “soldiers”. This young man spent 13 weeks in boot camp to earn the title “Marine”, a title which will forever set him apart from the other services. This is not an uncommon error and every time we (U.S. Marines) see it, we cringe. Thanks.

Fixed the title and text to address these errors. My apologies.