“Cloud sourcing”, among other things, is the term used to describe the technological approach used, for example, when you perform a ‘google’ search. As far as I – far from a computer geek – understand, Google didn’t so come up with the concept as it applied it in a distinctive way. The idea with ‘cloud sourced’ searching is that when you perform a search with it, you are not activating a search of a mainframe, or at least not by itself, but instead some mass of connected smaller processors, which don’t even have to be located on a single determinable site.

I’ve seen statements on behalf of Google that imply, albeit admitting the oversimplification, that the search process set up by Google ‘may’ actually recruit your own desktop’s or laptop’s processor to ’spread the task’, ’share the load’. It seems to me – again: far from a ‘copter head on such – that to some extent it ‘must’, because it IS recruiting your own machine’s processor, by definition, since the search is initiated on it. The secondary implication is that when some other individual, at home or at work or seated at Starbucks, is conducting her or his Google search, your own machine’s processor is available to be ‘recruited’ for the filling of that person’s ‘request’. [I don’t buy that strictly as implied, but the idea of such ‘recruitment’ strikes me as a pretty useful means by which Google can defend against claims of their having invaded your privacy, which of course they’re doing – with your permission, right up front – in order to track your usage on the toobz, to show to advertisers & to pay sites their share of ad revenue.]

As to gmail, Google [& for all I know Yahoo at some point, possibly before them, as well as Microsoft from some point after both], the original set of claims for it included that you’re not automatically storing content & related data on your machine, as you would be with Outlook & a lot of other programs with partnerships with or provided by ISPs who came to the area from years in the telephone biz or from a position in the cable biz. In many of those simply opening an email automatically saves it, or some representation of it, on your machine. In the case of gmail, for one, the basic design requires the user who clicks on a message to read it, to initiate a further step in actually downloading it onto one’s machine.

Instead, as Google regularly & routinely reminds its gmail users, there’s what’s for your purposes an unlimited amount of storage space for your gmail messages, off your machine, stored ‘in the clouds’, & available for you to retrieve, on your machine, or anyone’s, anywhere.

This all might seem a bit odd to those here without any practical experience with law enforcement in recent years, in which it’s become SOP for police or the FBI or whoever the investigators are, to physically seize a suspect’s or an arrested person’s processor, and, as was discussed an awful lot on the threads back some months with the legal actions by CREW and the National Security Archive, use now readily available technology to replicate or ‘take a picture’ of everything downloaded.

But with cloud-sourcing, the same ‘picture’ isn’t available to law enforcement by that route. And that has presented some concerns to law enforcement – & in the case of BushCo, more like something to be overcome, as usual, by hook or crook, reflexively the latter.

With email in general, currently [and has been for a while] available to anyone, if they take the time, to figure out the general location from which a message is sent, or at which it is accepted, and the actual processor from which the message is sent or on which it is accepted – though there are also a number of limitations, such as people choosing to route their email through a ‘clearing’ site [increasingly less of a problem as more home computers and home-based businesses come online, but with those who’ve been online since the early 1990s for instance there’s still a big percentage that from back in the earlier days of smaller, local services just continue with those].

But in addition to those limitations, the cloud-sourcers don’t actually ‘receive’ or ’store’ individual messages in any way comparable to Outlook et al, but instead what the user is doing by ’signing in’ with her or his password is ‘aggregating’ and/or ‘re-aggregating’, more like the result of googling.

The only keys are the user name & the password. Google stresses the password is private, and your only assurance of security. The government wanted our passwords, and Google, prominently, resisted. That’s part of why I think the Petitioner here is very likely Google.