FBI's Petraeus/Broadwell email dragnet reveals agency's sweeping surveillance power

The FBI's dumpster-dive into Paula Broadwell's email archive has not yet revealed evidence of any crime, but it has revealed to America the extent to which our government is capable of collecting and surveilling our electronic communications. Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post :

Many details surrounding the case remain unclear. The FBI declined to respond to a list of questions submitted by The Washington Post on its handling of personal information in the course of the Petraeus investigation. The bureau also declined to discuss even the broad guidelines for safeguarding the privacy of ordinary citizens whose e-mails might surface in similarly inadvertent fashion.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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traalfaz

Email is not a secure medium. People who are knowledgeable about this sort of things have said this since day one, they’re just ignored because people either don’t care or don’t want to be bothered.

Do not think that this is yet another “privacy is dead” signpost. I think that privacy is still very achievable, it just does not come easily.
- EH
  
  I was thinking over the weekend that the course of technological advancement has noticeably shied away from the concept of personal servers. If there was a turnkey self-hosted email server people could purchase and use to host their own email, complete with DNS services provided by either themselves or an ecosystem of supporting companies, it could bring each person’s email (at least) back into the realm of the 4th Amendment, warrants and subpoenas.
  - http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
    
    Maybe if you send your SMTP streams through an SSH tunnel. But the authorities can still infer who is talking to who that way and go directly for the hardware.
    - EH
      
      The point is to enable people to restore 4th Amendment protections for their email.
acerplatanoides

I think this was always the story. Judge Napoletano on The Daily Show last week is a pretty good interview, but I do get a bit nervous when the FOX guy is talking as much or more sense than Stewart.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/thu-november-15-2012-andrew-napolitano