Petraeus Case Illustrates FBI Authority To Read Email

An anonymous reader writes "Back in April, we discussed how the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act says email that has resided on a server for more than six months can be considered abandoned. The recent investigation of General Petraeus brings this issue to light again, and perhaps to a broader audience. Under current U.S. law, federal authorities need only a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor — not a judge — to obtain electronic messages that are six months old or older. Do you know anyone these days who doesn't have IMAP accounts with 6+-month-old mail on them?"

Comments

Re:Public servants

[PvtVoid]

That wasn't Petraeus, it was John Allen, who was Petraeus' successor, and until a few hours ago was on track to be the Supreme Commander of NATO.

Holy fuck, what is the matter with these people?

Re:Don't keep old email.

[bluefoxlucid]

Once lost account settings in Netscape and re-entered everything, the ISP dumped 4 years of e-mail from POP3 back down. Stuff I didn't want my parents to see, I got in a lot of trouble.

Re:Don't keep old email.

[bluefoxlucid]

TLS doesn't take care of shit. It gets encrypted, goes to your ISP, gets decrypted, gets sent, gets encrypted, goes to you, gets decrypted. TLS doesn't encrypt messages with your secret key (like PGP) so that intermediate parties can't read it.