The U.S. government — and probably your own authorities, for that matter — is either seeing your online activity every minute of the day through automated systems and nonhuman eavesdropping techniques, or has the skill to dip in as and when it deems essential — occasionally with a warrant, occasionally without.
Gen. David Petraeus, the former head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, stepped down over the weekend after he was discovered to have participated in an extramarital relationship. What caught outside Petraeus was, of all things, his use of Google’s internet e-mail service, Gmail.

This hasn’t only landed the former CIA chief in hot water but has ignited the argument over how, when, and why law enforcement agencies and authorities can get common citizens’ e-mail accounts if they’re the head of the strongest intelligence agency on the planet.

The odds are small that your own or a foreign authorities will snoop on you, in case it makes you feel any better.

Forget the interception of communications, or signals intelligence, or ECHELON by black boxes installed in data centers. Law enforcement bodies and intelligence agencies can get — thanks to the shift towards Web-based email services in the cloud — but it is not quite as exciting or as Jack Bauer esque as one may believe or hope for.

Petraeus composed email messages and set up a private account under a pseudonym but never sent them. Rather, they were saved in draft. His fan, Paula Broadwell, response, all without sending anything, read the e-mail and would log in under the exact same account.

And yes, pedophiles and terrorists are known to use this ‘trick’, but in addition this technique is likewise used by refined offenders. It makes it harder to follow, and removes a network trail to a greater or smaller extent.

But certainly IP addresses are logged and noticed? When e-mails are sent and received, yes. But the e-mails weren’t sent and thus were saved in draft. Nevertheless, Google may have a record of the IP addresses of people who logged into the account.

Nevertheless, most Internet or broadband suppliers offer dynamic IP addresses that change over time, and an IP address doesn’t consistently point to an identical computer the same area or state every time it’s assigned to a user.

Human error can land someone in the legal limelight as is frequently true. 37-year old Florida resident Jill Kelley, a family friend to the Petraeus’, supposedly received e-mails via an an account that is anonymous warning Kelley to avoid the CIA leader.

There is not any such thing as a really ‘anonymous’ e-mail account, and however much you really attempt to encrypt the contents of the e-mail you’re sending, email servers and messaging businesses attach small fragments of information. It is how electronic mail works and it is completely inevitable.

Every e-mail sent and received comes with ‘communications info,’ otherwise called “metadata” — small fragments of advice that carries the receiver as well as the sender’s address, and routing info including the IP addresses of the sender as well as the servers or data center that it is passed through.