Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
For anything interesting - enough said.
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?
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.
Patraeus is a public servant. The military and public servants agree to adhere to a higher standard of ethics when they take their jobs.
IMO, that isn't even the real problem. The CIA, in particular, doesn't care two squats about your dirty secrets, as long as you don't care about them either. The problem with a long-term affair, relative to the CIA, is that the people involved (by the very nature of having gone to those extents to keep it a secret) are now potentially able to be compromised by someone via blackmail.
You could have a long track record of photos of you snorting blow off a shaved donkeys ass while giving it a reach around, and the CIA won't care as long as you're not embarrassed about it.
You could have a long track record of photos of you snorting blow off a shaved donkeys ass while giving it a reach around, and the CIA won't care as long as you're not embarrassed about it.
Wait, how did you get a hold of my family Christmas photos?
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.
Patraeus is a public servant. The military and public servants agree to adhere to a higher standard of ethics when they take their jobs.
Making them easier to blackmail. I'd rather have a public servant agree to adhere to the letter of the law (as applicable to the rest of us) and not be put in a position where his/her behavior, acceptable for the general public, would put his/her job in jeopardy.
Patraeus is said to have sent 20 to 30,000 pages of emails to this lady.. What on earth was he sending her?
Probably a lot of copies of his military and CIA correspondence and reports (sanitized of course) for her use in his biography.
What others have said about the head of the CIA not being able to conceal an affair: This guy is an idiot for not knowing that his life is under scrutiny as a condition of having a secret clearance. Heck, here in Boeing territory, we all know that the DIA contacts our neighbors periodically to see if we (those of us with secret clearances) have 'unusual' lifestyle patterns that might signal possible compromise by foreign intelligence.
Funny anecdote: When conducting interviews, they ask my friends and neighbors not to discuss it with me. But their kids come over and say, "Hey mister! The FBI was asking my dad about you. Are you some sort of criminal or something?" [Yeah, I bury pesky kids in my back yard. So stay off my lawn!] So its pretty easy to find out when they do their rounds.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.