US authorities – state, local and federal – made an astounding 13,753 official requests to read emails or gather related information that was sent through Gmail and other Google services during 2012. The surprising factor was more than half of these requests were without warrants, according to new stats released by Google.
According to Google’s transparency data, almost all of these 13,753 inquiries, (6,542 of 8,438 in the second half of 2012) were done without any search warrant at all! How long has this been going on for? Well, Google did not start making any detailed info like this available until June of 2012, nor did it differentiate between federal and local law agencies.
Google revealed last June that it had reached a whopping 425 million active Gmail subscribers, easily making it THE largest email provider on planet earth. Don’t forget they also provide users cloud storage through Google drive, Phone service through Google voice, Youtube, Blogger, and also corporate Gmail hosting solutions.
It’s no secret that Google keeps detailed records and logs of all communication sent through email, phone, Youtube and other services, backing them up on cloud servers. This move allows government agencies, local, state and federal to easily thumb through people’ personal info without a warrant.
Current federal US law allows the government to freely access Google’s archives of data, including emails, chat logs, YouTube user info, Voice messages, Blogger info and more without obtaining a search warrant or even establishing probable cause. The scary part: Google now says that it willingly complies with a large majority of these requests for data by government officials.
The government can freely access any data, including the body of emails sent of received through Gmail. Since Google keeps detailed records of all email’s handled by it’s servers and stores the info on remote cloud servers, this lowers the “legal bar” allowing agencies to access user’s name, IP address, Phone number, and email communications.
How is this legal? You can thank the federal law known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which states that any email stored on a remote server – not a local hard drive – can be accessed without any warrant.
Since requests are usually in the form of criminal investigations, Google does not notify a user when an outside agency is depanding to read their emails or access their private account info.
“We notify users about legal demands when appropriate, unless prohibited by law or court order,” Google says on its transparency website.
“We can’t notify you if, for example, your account has been closed, or if we’re legally prohibited from doing so. We sometimes fight to give users notice of a data request by seeking to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants.”
Let’s face it, online privacy in the United States is quickly becoming a thing of the past. If you want truly Anonymous email that is secure and encrypted – don’t use gmail. Use an offshore email solution like TorGuard Anonymous email which employs powerful OpenPGP encryption on all email messages. If you want your Google searches and web traffic to be private – Well you better get a VPN service provider really fast. Anonymous VPN service like TorGuard, encrypt your web traffic virtually tunneling your entire internet experience in an offshore country of your choosing. Both your email and internet traffic will be safe from prying eyes.
