I found out about this thru a connection on Google Plus. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/chevron-ecuador-american-email-l egal-activists-journalists We have seen recent news about what the government can do with the metadata, the claim that they store the info for 5 years, and only get certain kinds of metadata. We have also seen that the courts have ruled that the 4th amendment does not apply to "our" data in the hands of 3rd parties like ISPs, Telcom, utilities, banks, etc., because the 4th amendment only applies to "our" records explicitly in our hands. I suspect our hands also does not include data on our computers, judging from some courts mandating that people turn over passwords, so the cops can get at what's on some people electronic devices. Chevron wins a law suit . they can get 9 years worth of metadata -which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content-belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy <http://www.chevron.com/documents/pdf/ecuador/StampedComplaint.pdf> , which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled <http://dg5vd3ocj3r4t.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/documents/Kaplan-Or der-Hotmail-IP-subpoena_0.pdf> it didn't violate the First Amendment because Americans weren't among the people targeted. Now Mother Jones has learned that the targeted accounts do include Americans-a revelation that calls the validity of the subpoena into question. Al Mac = Alister William Macintyre