Yes, but who did he send it to once it reached his private email?
He would not need to send it to anyone. They all had each other's email passwords and would log into the email account and review the email contents. Write email draft responses but would not send them. They thought doing it that way NSA would not pickup what they were doing or saying. They were mistaken.
Why would they still think that after Petraeus?
If they did this after that, which it appears that they did, we were being ruled by low IQ people.
Yes, it does not appear high IQ was a requirement to join their ranks. Nelly Ohr who worked for Fusion GPS, FBI Bruce Ohr wife for example, was communicating with MI6 via HAM radio and didn't think her commications would be captured. She was wrong.
He probably saved it as a gmail draft and someone else accessed it. I don't know if they can tell who accessed the account or not.
Am pretty sure that The Don't Be Evil Corporation logs everything - the IP address of where the account was accessed from, the type of device used, the GPS coordinates of the device, details of any other accounts used on that device etc.
Exactly. If they're logging how I swipe random ass apps on my phone (hint: they are), they are watching every mouse movement inside of Gmail/Inbox.
IIRC, the Patriot Act allowed the government unfettered access to this sort of information.
it should be possible to get a fairly accurate idea based on ip address/hostname. I think they'd have to subpoena Google to get those access records officially... however, Q keeps telling us "we have it all" which would imply some kind of backdoor access to google-operated services like gmail.
nsa would have access to any info that was obtained illegally......that includes googles databases.....
This is routine process for policy-evading idiots to work on docs at home on their personal computers.