"On February 13, 2023, it came to the Government’s attention, based on data obtained through the use of a pen register on the defendant’s Gmail account, that the defendant has used a VPN or “Virtual Private Network” on at least two occasions to access the internet."
I hadn't heard of a pen register before. Apparently it's monitoring:
- All email header information other than the subject line
- The email addresses of the people to whom an email was sent
- The email addresses of people whom received the email
- The time each email is sent or received
- The size of each email that is sent or received
As an aside, would headers give away the fact he was using a VPN when using Gmail?
My first thought was that it might be from the originating IP address. But if he used the Gmail website (online client), wouldn't that have been Gmail's SMTP server IP?
Edit: from this conversation on Stack Exchange[1]: "IIRC, Google never had client IP information in its web mail headers."
I hadn't heard of a pen register before. Apparently it's monitoring:
- All email header information other than the subject line
- The email addresses of the people to whom an email was sent
- The email addresses of people whom received the email
- The time each email is sent or received
- The size of each email that is sent or received
As an aside, would headers give away the fact he was using a VPN when using Gmail?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register