Phone calls return to Gmail thanks to a Hangouts upgrade

Google is making good on its promise to bring back free voice calls in Gmail, after temporarily removing them a couple months ago.

Voice calls disappeared from Gmail in May, when the company replaced Google Chat with a new feature called Hangouts. While Hangouts still allowed users to make video calls and receive calls to their Google Voice numbers, the ability to make outbound calls to landlines and mobile phones was missing, at least for a little while.

Over the next few days, Google will roll out an updated version of Hangouts, restoring outbound voice calls and adding new features to the service.

 
Users can now create a group call by adding multiple phone numbers, and can have mixed calls with some recipients on voice and others on video. Google's also throwing in some silly effects, such as applause and laughter, through the Google Effects app.

Calls within the United States and Canada will remain free. (Last we heard, Google had extended free calls through 2013; we've reached out to Google to see if it'll stay that way indefinitely now.) Hangouts users in other countries can now call the United States and Canada for free as well. Calls to outside the United States and Canada are still subject to various per-minute rates.

So far, there's no word about whether SMS messaging will be brought back to Gmail, but chances are it'll show up eventually. Google has said that Hangouts is “designed to be the future of Google Voice,” so it seems likely we'll see more integrated Voice features, such as SMS and voicemails, over time. (Here's hoping we do, at least.) For now, you can still send text messages from your Google Voice number using the Google Voice Website.

Google says voice calls should be available over the next few days, appearing as a phone icon on the right side of the “New Hangout” box. Users will also be able to make calls through Google+ and the Hangouts Chrome extension, using the drop-down menu on the right side of the “New Hangout” box.

In WikiLeaks Probe, Feds Used a Secret Search Warrant to Get Volunteer's Gmail

The Justice Department used a secret search warrant to obtain the entire contents of a Gmail account used by a former WikiLeaks volunteer in Iceland, according to court records released to the volunteer this week.

The search warrant was issued under seal on October 14, 2011 by the Alexandria, Virginia federal judge overseeing the WikiLeaks grand jury investigation there. The warrant ordered Google to turn over “the contents of all e-mails associated with the account, including stored or preserved copies of e-mails sent to and from the account, draft e-mails, deleted e-mails [...] the source and destination addresses associated with each e-mail, the date and time at which each e-mail was sent, and the size and length of each e-mail.” The warrant also ordered Google not to disclose the search to anyone.

 

The target of the search was Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic activist who helped manage WikiLeaks’ secure chat room in 2010. Snorrason was one of the WikiLeaks volunteers who resigned from the organization en masse in September 2010. But that evidently didn’t stop the government from grabbing Snorrason’s email a full year later.

 

The search is the first confirmed case of the government obtaining the contents of a WikiLeaks-connected e-mail account. The government won a public court battle in January 2012 to obtain non-content metadata from the Twitter accounts of three WikiLeaks associates: Seattle coder and activist Jacob Appelbaum; Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s parliament; and Dutch businessman Rop Gonggrijp. The feds also got metadata on Appelbaum from Google and the ISP Sonic.net.

 

In those cases, the government got the records under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment to the Stored Communications Act that allows law enforcement access to non-content internet records, such as transaction information, without demonstrating the “probable cause” needed for a search warrant.

 

The documents show that the government also got a 2703(d) order for Snorrason’s Gmail metadata on August 12, 2011, and then followed that up with the full-blown search warrant two months later.

 

The search warrant (.pdf) remains sealed, as does the affidavit — presumably by the FBI — establishing probable cause. But in May, US. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady issued an order allowing Google to notify Snorrason of the search and to provided a redacted copy of the warrant. Snorrason says he received notification from Google via email on Tuesday.

 

“Because I talked to Julian Assange, all information held by Google relating to my user account with them can be handed over to U.S. prosecutors,” Snorrason wrote today. “How is this reasonable? How is this a particular description? How, in short, is this shit valid under the U.S. Bill of Rights? I’d really like someone to explain that to me. With a straight face. Preferably without making me want to punch them in the process.

 

“And this is just my Google account,” he adds. “What else did they take — and whose?”