k0an.com

The story about warrantless eavesdropping has been in the news for months and it doesn't look like anything will change that policy in the near future. However, there is one aspect of the story that has been barely covered by the media, email monitoring.

How do you determine if an email is: a) from a U.S. citizen; b) to someone outside of the U.S.? It is trivial for someone from Syria to sign up for a free email account that is hosted in America. There are email servers serving up email for dozens of countries and there is no way to tell by the email address what country you are from.

So, since the government is preventing any investigation on the mechanics of this system, we know emails are being monitored, and we know there isn't a good way to sort "foreign" emails from U.S. emails it is not a significant leap of faith to believe that all U.S. emails are being monitored. I'm not surprised by this, there have been rumors of this for years. However, this is the first time I've seen where public officials alluded to the fact through public statements.