Judge Orders Deleted Emails Turned Over

Anonymous Coward writes "In a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, a subpoena sent to Google orders the turnover of the complete contents of a Gmail account, including deleted e-mail messages. The Judge has granted the subpoena and orders that all e-mail messages, including deleted messages, be divulged. Google's privacy policy says deleted e-mail messages 'may remain in our offline backup systems' in perpetuity. It does not guarantee that backups are ever deleted. So much for the Delete Forever button."

Comments

Re:Easiest way to deal with this in 2 easy steps

[Mostly a lurker]

Using the POP interface to Gmail, by default keeps a copy on the server. If you override this default, it then becomes deleted email that Google's privacy policy states 'may remain in our offline backup systems' in perpetuity.

Encryption would be the way to go with email if all your correspondents would agree to cooperate. In my case, there are perhaps two people I correspond with regularly via email who might consider making the effort.

Re:Encrypt everything.

[brasscount]

Encrypt away, they'll subpoena the email, you're right. Then they'll subpoena the passphrase. If you don't comply with the subpoena for the passphrase, they'll obtain a search warrant, and find where you wrote it down, admit it, its in a card in your wallet, or in some pass store software, isn't it? Then they'll use good old fashioned forensics to decrypt the shadow cache and drag a list of passwords on your server out in the open.

And finally, if that doesn't work, they'll throw you in jail for contempt of court until such time as you do remember your passphrase.

Don't underestimate the power of the government to discover secrets, they've been in the business for years.

What concerns me more is this enforced compliance with a subpoena for a crime that might have been committed, but for which they have to conduct a search to determine if evidence exists that a crime was committed. This thing stinks to high heaven of unconstitutional and illegal search and seizure. Where are the lawyers screaming habeas corpus?