The F.B.I.’s request to access the private Gmail account maintained by General Petraeus would have been only one of 34,614 accounts that governments as well as civil litigants around the world requested access to between January and June, 2012. The U.S. was by far the largest requester of user data (16,281 accounts), followed by India (3,467) and Brazil (2,640—many of them seeking to discover the identities of posters making critical comments about political candidates, which is illegal in Brazil).

These requests arrive in Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, by variety of means, including agents showing up in the lobby demanding data they can take away with them. A team of some two dozen lawyers working under Rick Salgado, a former federal prosecutor who is Google’s Director of Law Enforcement and Information Security, and who in turn reports to Kent Walker, the company’s general counsel, takes them from there. Most of the requests have a turn-around deadline, which is, Salgado told me recently, “the worst of all possible worlds” for his staff: “a high volume of these things with a deadline and the consequences of wrong disclosure are very bad”—bad, that is, for the users. Failure to turn over information can also have law-enforcement consequences, possibly exposing Google to obstruction charges.

“Most of this legal process doesn’t give us much context for this,” Salgado went on. “A subpoena that comes to us from a federal agency will just say, ‘Here’s this e-mail address. We need you to disclose information about who this user is.’ ”

As Patrick Radden Keefe pointed out in a post yesterday, in the U.S. much of the legal authority for these requests rests on an antiquated federal statute, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Among other deficiencies, the law doesn’t extend the same level of protection to e-mail stored in the cloud—where most Gmail resides—as it does to e-mail stored on your hard drive. In the eyes of the law, e-mail on your hard drive gets the same level of protection as documents in your personal filing cabinet—the government needs a search warrant to access it. But e-mail stored in the cloud is equivalent to documents in a public warehouse: the government can obtain them with a simple subpoena; no court procedure is required.

“We think that’s a little crazy,” Kent Walker told me. “From a law-enforcement perspective, by putting your documents in a storehouse and giving a third party the right to access them, you’ve lost your privacy rights. But in today’s day and age, where everyone is using the cloud in this way… effectively you have that same expectation of privacy as you would if it was on your computer, but the law doesn’t recognize that.” The Digital Due Process Coalition, of which Google is a member, is seeking to bring the E.C.P.A. in line with the way most data is stored today.

Whether a revamped E.C.P.A. would have saved Petraeus from scandal—and thereby possibly left him exposed him to some future blackmailer—is an unanswerable question. But at the very least an updated E.C.P.A. might save the dying art of the love letter. “The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter,” Mark Twain writes in his autobiography. “The writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.” As things stand now, the cloud is no place for love.

Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo.