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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."
I TOLD YOU SO.
I've maintained before that Google retains far too much information to make the use of Gmail anything less than a full-blown privacy nightmare. (For more information, please look here and here.)
And now, the chickens have come home to roost. From TFA: A stunning victory for the Establishment and a horror show for private citizens everywhere. Welcome to 1984.
And before you start, please don't object that the person affected is a defendant in a criminal proceeding, because that's quite beside the point. The point is that Google has this information on you, and will hand it over upon request. This vindicates the caterwauling of all the privacy advocates concerning Google and Gmail, and establishes a dangerous legal precedent. Remember, as our 'inalienable' rights are systematically stripped away by the architects of the New World Order, more and more of the things you do become 'illegal'...and subject to criminal persecution...er...prosecution. It might not be long before you are being referred to as 'defendant'...what will you think of your Gmail account then?
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
With everything that's been going on lately, it sounds like the American government really wants to take Google down in the war of public opinion. The gov't just keeps trying to make them look worse and worse. And since the American courts typically just allow the gov't to do whatever it wants, they're winning.
Hey, I happen to know YOUR company does backups! You deleted your mail from the server, but you didn't hunt down those tapes in the vault, did you? Huh?
Does NO ONE remember Ollie North and the White House PROFS system? 20 years later, and people still think incriminating data will always just go away when you desire.
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE COPIED.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Might Google be under some sort of secret agreement with the gov't to hold on to emails, just for circumstances like these? It really doesn't make much sense from a storage perspective to keep around tons of deleted emails. If I were Google, the Delete Forever button would clear any deleted email off of my very crowded storage systems at the same time that it clears it out of a user's inbox.
Someone think of the poor people that will have to read through all the spam that goes through one mailbox!!!
... I can picture the defense getting a 80GB archive tape and being told that was all messages recieved. Yes, 99.999% of them are spam. Enjoy.
Heck
Talk about burying the opposition in paperwork.
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Considering my first meeting today was regarding how best to redesign the mail system to make it easier to comply withsubpoenas in the future. Step one of that redesign: turn off the backups!
Just more proof that the 'e' in email doesn't stand for 'electronic', it's 'evidence'.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
And the very things one deletes can be quite telling, as well.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
I was rather concerned with how the speaker on the BBC special about Google stepped around the question about retained search history from users by identifyable means (They didn't say what it was, and I'm not very familiar with web technology, so might be IP or MAC (maybe not), Idk). Emails are one thing, but I think most have googled something they are ashamed of or wouldn't want others knowing about. Yes, they know you searched for "ultra-midgest-fetsh" last night, and may use it in the future against you.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Does anybody use voice mail provided to them from their cell phone or landline phone provider?
Where is that data stored?
Has any telco been ordered by a court to turn over that voice data?
Just curious...
Look folks.. Privacy simply does not exist. You'll get your search terms read, email copied, if you encrypt you have to give over the keys and if you don't then you get put into prison anyway.
Your phone will be tapped, mobile will be tracked, cars followed with "traffic enforcement cameras". Your DNA will be on file, biometrics saved and your Underground trips logged.
Everywhere you go there are CCTV cameras, face recognition. Your purchases are tracked with credit cards, store loyalty cards and RFID tags. Your bank transactions are flagged if they look interesting and the tax people peer into your account looking for money that suddenly appears.
1984 got here, oh, 22 years ago now...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm not buying it. Here's a way to test your theory. Delete an email message with a large pdf attachment. Wait a few days and contact Google. Tell them you had a hard drive failure and a message you deleted contained the only copy of your Ph.D. thesis. Beg, plead, cajole. Offer them anything.
I'll bet you a beer you won't get the message back. Google's long-term data retention policies have nothing to do with altruistic measures to protect users from data loss.
Okay, so let's say we did want to send emails to a small group of people without it coming back to haunt us. This is a lot of work, but then, if you want to do something illegal, you'll probably consider it reasonable.
/dev/null (after you finish setting it up, of course -- heh) and only offers one outward-facing service: ssh.
;)
:)
First: set up a computer on a residential connection that sends all logs to
Second: set up local accounts for all the people you want to communicate with, and limit them reading their mail locally via ssh only.
Third: Show each user how to read the email by sshing into the machine and reading the text mails with vi, or with mutt, or some other command-line emailer.
Fourth: Create an iso that can be used to set the box back up from scratch to the current config, and that performs the install without user intervention, and employs a disk-wiping mechanism during the install.
Fifth: Set the computer to boot from CD first, and a cron job to reboot the machine every night at 2am.
Now you can happily send email to each other all day long. Every evening, the box reboots, wipes itself, and reloads everything, so mail isn't stored locally for more than 22 hours or so, limiting the amount of incriminating evidence on the machine. Even if the machine's traffic is captured and stored, the encryption is via ssh, so you can't provide your private key for decryption -- there isn't one.
Your only real concerns now are ssh exploits, weak passwords, and your cohorts cut and pasting content from the ssh session onto their local computer. But then, if they'd do that, there are probably lots of other ways they're screwing up the heist.
Also, having never actually done anything like this, it's pure speculation. Someone tell me why it won't work.
3. More conventional computer power than the rest of the world combined. (Extremely unlikely.)
I'll agree that the NSA certainly doesn't have more general purpose computing power than the rest of the world combined, but I suspect that they may have more special purpose computing power. The NSA uses a lot of custom hardware and has access to significant microprocessor fabrication capacity, and when you're looking at integer factorization, it's not unreasonable to expect a hundred-fold increase in performance when going from general purpose hardware to custom circuitry.
I would personally be very surprised if the NSA were unable to factor several 1024-bit composites per day.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid