Access Now

On average, an American office worker sends and receives roughly 120 emails per day, a number that grows with each passing year. The ubiquity and utility of email has turned it into a fine-grained record of our day-to-day lives, rich with mundane and potentially embarrassing details, stored in a perpetual archive, accessible from anywhere on earth and protected, in some cases, by nothing more than a single password.

FBI Kept Demanding Email Records Despite DOJ Saying It Needed a Warrant:

The secret government requests for customer information Yahoo made public Wednesday reveal that the FBI is still demanding email records from companies without a warrant, despite being told by Justice Department lawyers in 2008 that it doesn’t have the lawful authority to do so.

That comes as a particular surprise given that FBI Director James Comey has said that one of his top legislative priorities this year is to get the right to acquire precisely such records with those warrantless secret requests, called national security letters, or NSLs. “We need it very much,” Comey told Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., during a congressional hearing in February.

Hacker collects 272m email addresses and passwords, some from Gmail:

The passwords and email addresses, which include some from Gmail, Yahoo and Russia’s mail.ru service, aren’t necessarily the keys to millions of email accounts. Rather, they had been taken from various smaller, less secure websites where people use their email addresses along with a password to log in.

People who use a different password for both their email account and, say, Target.com, won’t be affected. But those who tend to use the same password for multiple sites as well as their email should change their email password.

It May Soon Be a Lot Harder for the Law to Get Into Your Email:

As of today, a warrant is not required to access emails stored online for more than 180 days, which applies to the vast majority of people’s emails—it’s common to keep correspondence stored in webmail for years. (We all do it.) That means law enforcement are required to satisfy a lower standard of legal reasoning to read your webmail than if you printed your email and stored it in a desk drawer.

The law that governs email privacy in the United States hasn’t been updated since 1986, but thanks to the efforts of a coalition of advocates and technology companies, like Google, Microsoft, and Etsy, that have been working together since 2010, the thirty year old email privacy statute may finally get an update.

Teen Who Hacked CIA Director’s Email Tells How He Did It:

The hacker, who says he’s under 20 years old, told WIRED that he wasn’t working alone but that he and two other people worked on the breach. He says they first did a reverse lookup of Brennan’s mobile phone number to discover that he was a Verizon customer. Then one of them posed as a Verizon technician and called the company asking for details about Brennan’s account.

“[W]e told them we work for Verizon and we have a customer on scheduled callback,” he told WIRED. The caller told Verizon that he was unable to access Verizon’s customer database on his own because “our tools were down.”

After providing the Verizon employee with a fabricated employee Vcode—a unique code the he says Verizon assigns employees—they got the information they were seeking.