US Police Increasingly Peeping At Email, IMs

Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @12:14AM from the y'know-just-a-little-peek dept.

angry tapir writes "US law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such as Sprint, Facebook and AOL, but few detailed statistics are available, according to a privacy researcher. Police and other agencies have 'enthusiastically embraced' asking for e-mail, instant messages and mobile-phone location data, but there's no US federal law that requires the reporting of requests for stored communications data, according to Christopher Soghoian, a doctoral candidate at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University."

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Happened to me by Anonymous Coward · 2011-04-13 00:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

I had an out-of-state police dept. gain access to my Gmail account for a joke email I forwarded to somebody who requested it. The intended recipient provided me the wrong email address (off by one letter) and it ended up in the wrong mailbox. It was not threatening/sick/graphic, yet they were able to access my account and locate me by phone.