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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?"
I don't have a useless IMAP account - I keep all my valuable messages on Hotmail
This is why I delete my old emails every 3 months.
Of course, when you're living in "The Cloud©," who's to say that the "Delete" button really deletes your email, and doesn't just shift it off to some secondary storage cache where it sits undisturbed for years until the FBI decides it wants to read it?
"Rather than transmitting emails to the other's inbox, they composed at least some messages and left them in a draft folder or in an electronic dropbox, AP said" http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/11/13/petraeus-broadwell-email/1702057/ Yea some of them may have been in the drafts folder. Sending email to your secret lover is old school and gone to get you caught. OOPS maybe it did.
It all starts at 0
While its probably a good idea to erase your personally incriminating emails that you wrote 6 or more months ago (or a week ago!), at some point we want our CIA personnel to not be acting like idiots.
Don't leave behind incriminating evidence!
News at 11.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The thing about it is that Petraeus likely won't be charged or prosecuted for anything. So basically the FBI was "just checking" to make sure no law was broken. If they can do it to the CIA director they likely can do it for anyone they damn near please. Anyone suspected of cheating on their wife is fair game apparently.
Petraeus was the head of our CIA and couldn't keep his own affair secret? If he can't camp a little action off on the side without getting caught, I sure don't want him in charge of our country's Department of Spies.
I don't think I'm an interesting party (what a setup), but I'm glad to hear POP3 is safe ;)
For anything interesting - enough said.
Keep in mind that if you read your email using your work computer, then your employer can read it too - don't trust SSL to keep it private, your employer can transparently decrypt the SSL stream and re-encrypt using their own cert which your (well, your employer's) computer will trust.
If you want to keep your private email private, only read it on your own device, don't trust anyone else's device.
I don't understand why GPG is not baked into everyone's mail client by now. All my geek friends have my public key.
You should be using 4096 bit encryption and a public key server.
For someone in his position, he should know better than that.
Even an idiot can install Thunderbird and then put the Enigmail plugin on top of it.
I'm thinking that the these emails are long strings of replies back and forth, with each email repeating the stuff already sent previously. What with all the blank spaces, headers, wrapping of text, I can see how that the page count gets inflated by quite a bit.
Ibid.
You only have rights if you're beligerent and EXPLICITLY demand them. Quit presuming that the government has any obligations to give you your rights. They do their level best only because of the consequences of them not doing so and somoene calling them out on it. What we're being presented here is explictly UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Yeah, yeah, it costs all sorts of money and effort to stand up for your rights. Freedom's NEVER free.
It's come time to decide, people... Are you slaves? Are you free men? If you're free men, that comes at a price- and you've got to be willing to PAY it.
Firstly, "Freedom's Not Free" as a slogan is already taken, and sadly I report it doesn't mean what you and I would like it to.
Secondly, as the great George Carlin said: "This country is finished, it has been for a long time, but everyone has a cell phone that makes pancakes and rubs their balls, so they dont wanna rock the boat."
I am not a crackpot.
They do not have authority that is approved by the guidelines the Founders of this country created.
What it means is they are violating the founders intents and any supposed law in violation are not real laws but fabrications of distortions backed by nothing more than brute force using abstract words to make themselves feel better about it.
There are many violations of the founders intents. The Declaration of Independence even acknowledges the probability of corrupt government and the founders in doing so gave us recognition of our rights and duty to put off bad government and replace it with what the founders intended. They even provided us with real life example.
So No they do not have the Authority to try and take advantage of the short comings of technology that they perceive. Especially when the Email account is still actively being used. Being used does mean clearly that it is not an abandon mail.
I have wondered about this. I would hope that, if you have your own virtual private server, you could argue that it was analagous to renting an office, in which case, 4th amendment protections would apply.
I think that the argument for goverment snooping on email is that the ISP manages the email, thus you have already given access to a 3rd party. If you host it yourself, on a machine that is not managed by an ISP (beyond providing the virtual machine), there is no 3rd part involved in processing your email.
Of course the email may still be available at the other end of the conversation, because it may originate or be received by a traditional ISP that must manage the email.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
When I worked at AT&T it automatically deleted ANY email older than 30 days. Deleted for you. plus they scanned for and deleted any PST files found on any computer.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"In a parallel process, the investigators gained access, probably using a search warrant, to Ms. Broadwell’s Gmail account. There they found messages that turned out to be from Mr. Petraeus." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/us/david-petraeus-case-raises-concerns-about-americans-privacy.htm
The only reason that the FBI was able to gain access to her e-mails was because Google complied with FBI's request. So it seems that the real question is not about how vulnerable your email is to "hackers", but whether your email provider keeps your communications private.
Seriously, its not impressive. Hasn't been for at least 15 years.
Second ... NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOUR MAIL. You are not a former high level military officer or high level politician. You are in fact nobody, just like me. How do I know you are nobody? Cause you have the spare time to dick around on slashdot and ... run your own mail server for no reason other than to wave it around like an epenis. Hell, most of you would be bragging up a shit storm if you had an affair.
All you do by bragging about running your own personal mail server is prove that you have more time than money ... and probably brains since you can get any of several places to host your mail for free and without ads if you don't use their web interface, so the end result is pretty much 0 cost hosting.
What do you do that someone cares about? Why is the government going to want your mail? Because you act like a bad ass on slashdot? I think not.
No one cares about your mail any more than they care about mine. Okay, so maybe a handful of people here have a reason to be concerned, I'm sure there are a few, but they aren't the ones bragging about running their own mail servers either. They are the ones that keep their head down and mouth shut ... hence why they haven't already been handled.
The more you go on and on about how you stick it to the government, the more you make it clear that the government doesn't give a shit about you and that you really don't actually know what you're doing ... or at the very least, why you are doing it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Nobody keeps lots of mail there for longer than six months.
In fact, people do. However, corporate email accounts at Google auto-delete email after 180 days because of the 1986 act. There was much grumbling when this came about, and there are exceptions for people with an email "litigation hold", but for everyone else, it's part of normal operation that it's deleted.
I believe that this is a settable option for corporate managed accounts (i.e. hosted domain email for commercial companies which pay Google to manage their companies mail).
I know that most other public corporations, such as Penton Media, have similar 6 month deletion policies. IBM's policy when I worked there (circa 2001) was 1 year, and switched to 6 months while I was employed by them.
Apple had a two year policy because it was difficult to establish separate policy for the US vs. Europe for compliance with Directive 2006/24/EC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive and Apple conservatively classed itself as an ISP. I don't know what their current policy is, given that the U.S. equivalent H.R.1076/S.436 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAFETY never made it into law.
Holy fuck, what is the matter with these people?
Nothing.
All Petraeus did was have a girlfriend. So at worst he was a dick to his wife, which is not a crime.
Allen might be in real trouble if he was sharing classified info. 20,000-30,000 is a LOT. That's over 60 a day for a year.
paintball