DOJ abandons warrantless attempt to read e-mail | Hacker News Reader

DOJ abandons warrantless attempt to read e-mail

news.cnet.com

48 pointsmetamemetics12 comments

What I don't understand is cops usually have no problem finding a judge to sign any kind of warrant, no matter how crazy or wide the scope.

So exactly how wild of a goose-chase are they doing that they can't even find a judge to give them a warrant that they feel the need to skip the process entirely?

Also very bothersome, Yahoo gave them a great deal of info already without any warrant, they just didn't want to give them email that were less than 6 months old.

The emails they want must have been internal to yahoo's system (yahoo to yahoo account) because there is no way you could convince me that the government doesn't have a copy of every email sent via pop3/smtp since 9/11 because they are completely in plain text.

'The emails they want must have been internal to yahoo's system (yahoo to yahoo account) because there is no way you could convince me that the government doesn't have a copy of every email sent via pop3/smtp since 9/11 because they are completely in plain text.'

Maybe I'm just being naive but can someone comment on how accurate this actually is?

Very, any email that does not stay on the same network (i.e. yahoo to yahoo, gmail to gmail etc.) is usually transmitted in plaintext and will pass through any one of a number of routers that the NSA is using to sniff traffic.

Shameless plug- a rant by me on the topic of little to no security when communicating on the net, even when using encryption.

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/dublinclontarf/blog/2010/04/13/cry...

No no I don't mean the feasibility of it I mean the actual accuracy of it: do we have any reason to think the NSA etc. is SAVING every email sent? Beyond sniffing etc.

They cannot possibly process that much email in realtime and terabytes of storage is dirt cheap (especially on an endless government spy budget) hence the storage.

I am betting gmail poses a real problem for them because so many people use it, but since one of the google founders has ties to the CIA, you can be sure they have an official backdoor.

'but since one of the google founders has ties to the CIA, you can be sure they have an official backdoor.'

Source? Never heard that...

So they are realtime STORING all that stuff, but not processing it? DOesn't this mean it's constantly growing and eventually will become impossible to process unless they really speed up the processing right?

That was quick.

Sure, but it feels a lot more like the DoJ is backpedaling to avoid the PR fallout (or worse, from their perspective, legislative reform) if they keep charging ahead with this. It's only a temporary victory.

You believe this?

Well, they abandon an above-board attempt to do this, certainly. As to whether they're doing it anyway, we can't tell.

Yes, it's highly unlikely that DOJ, Google, Yahoo, CNET etc are colluding to misreport this event.

If you meant do I believe that NO level of email monitoring is occurring by ANY government agency, the answer is no. The NSA most assuredly does to some degree, but it is important to emphasize that any information they collect extra-judicially cannot be used in court.

YAHOO!!!! (HOORAY!)

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