U.S. digital privacy law was written before e-mail was popular: Here's a doozy. The privacy law that governs digital communications was last updated in 1986, or, as the ACLU puts it, when "there was no World Wide Web, nobody carried a cell phone, and the only 'social networking' two-year-old Mark Zuckerberg (now the CEO of Facebook) was doing was at pre-school or on play dates."

The law, called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, has some seemingly odd provisions, including one that, according to Wired, allows authorities to access e-mail that's more than 6 months old without a warrant from a judge. All that's needed is a subpoena, which is easier to obtain.

"It's not yet clear on precisely what legal authority the FBI obtained access to Broadwell's e-mail," The New Yorker says, "but under the relevant federal statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government need do little more than ask."