E-Mail Security in the Wake of Petraeus

What is the difference between a warrant and a court order? Both presumably have judicial oversight, so is it just a difference in the standard required to issue one?<p>This reminds me of an experience I had several years ago. My sweet grandma fell prey to a scam where someone called her, impersonating me, and said I was in trouble in a foreign country and needed money. She sent some money via Western Union (or a comparable service, I don't remember which one) to my name, and the scammer picked the money up. To do this the scammer needed ID under my name. I called up the company and asked to see a copy of the ID that was used, since I wanted to know if any of my documents had been compromised.<p>The company said they wouldn't release that information without a subpoena, which seemed reasonable to me (for all they knew, I was an attacker trying to steal someone else's ID). But I couldn't find any way of getting a court order of any kind. It seemed reasonable to me that I should have standing to see what ID was used to impersonate me and steal money from my grandmother, but I couldn't find any options for actually obtaining it.<p>In this situation, I would have loved a way to obtain a court order for this information.

I'm still confused about this whole thing. What did he do that he needed to resign for? As far as I can tell, he had an affair, which isn't exactly uncommon, and probably has zero influence on how he worked in his job.

I don't personally buy that the solution to this is to "rein in the FBI" if we're talking about the security of the CIA chief vis-a-vis the FBI. The point is that a motivated attacker could do all these things to a high value target. It might sound far-fetched but having damaging personal information about a CIA chief is very valuable. I don't condone judging people by their worst actions, but I think that the government would rather the FBI found out this information than someone else.

Yes another reason why I still bother to maintain an email server for 150 people in our family and friends circles.<p>It is one hundred times more expensive than industrial hosting but, if you know what you want there is only one way to get it.

The issue is not whether or not FBI should be able to do something like this, but they should be following more strict procedures, and they should always need a warrant and "probably cause". It's pretty scary that the FBI can get all this information about someone just because there's a 10th degree relationship between someone they were following and you.<p>But this case was pretty horrible to begin with. It seems FBI was only doing this as a "favor" to someone, and it wasn't about finding evidence about Petraeus having an affair, that enemies could've exploited, because they weren't aware about this, and they only found it by mistake.<p>All I'm saying is that the Government having this kind of power doesn't represent the "land of the free" very well, that US is supposed to be, and it has a lot more in common with a dictatorship/totalitarian state than with a true democratic republic.<p>It seems to me that technology is making it irresistible for Governments all over the world, whether democratic or not, to want to spy on their citizens and know everything about them. The lure of absolute and all-knowing power is very tempting, the easier it gets with new technology.<p>If this doesn't become a real political issue, and is not stopped, I could easily envision how 30-40 years from now, when technology will make it possible for people to interact with technology through mind control, it will also be very easy technologically wise to see what people are thinking, and the Governments will no doubt want to easily access that, too.<p>There's already another scary trend starting to show-up - that of pre-crime recognition, although it's still in its very early stages. But imagine when we'll start to use quantum computers. Those computers could easily create all the needed statistics and possibilities to show how likely someone is to commit a crime in the near future, and I could see the government and law enforcement agencies wanting to use that. I think we've all read the reports of NYPD police raiding the OWS leaders a night before the protests were supposed to happen. This is not mere unlikely theory. It's already happening, just on a much smaller scale.<p>It would simply be irresistible to them at the time, just like they love being able to obtain all the data about you without a warrant right now, and they'd love if it they could do even more without a warrant, and are lobbying for these types of laws in Congress. The only way to stop these sort of trends is for people to take a stand, and vote for people who are against them.

This is beyond scary, we all basically live in a police state now and their is nothing we can do about it. Schneier's last line just about sums it up...