Slow News Day?

I'm puzzled by the coverage of the Councilman case, for example, today's story in Wired News. The news spin seems to be that the Court found it completely legal for an ISP owner to read his customers' e-mails because they were on his system. But that's not what the Court decided. The Court simply held that the defendant was not criminally liable of a very specific federal criminal charge- wiretapping because he didn't "intercept" anything as that term is properly construed in the wiretap statute.
Now this isn't particularly good for privacy but it doesn't strike me as a step back. It merely illustrates where we've been almost all along, which is at that we have as much privacy in e-mail and online activities as our ISP chooses to give us. Maybe the law should create a presumption in favor of "your" e-mail account being private and invasions, even by the owner of the system, to be punishable civilly or even criminally. Seems extreme to me, but many privacy advocates seem to favor a paternalistic approach. The law seems to be out of sync with consumers' intuition about what they should expect when they open an e-mail account. but it isn't the wiretap law that's out of sync, it's the whole body of law that places too much importance on where data travels and is stored and not enough on what kind of data it is and who wrote it and why.