Yes, The Feds Can Read Your Email (and more) - Comments Page 1

Bob, I have enjoyed your newsletter for years.
Please tell me: if I am a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide, what do I care if the Feds read my email?

EDITOR'S NOTE: See these pages:

https://privacysos.org/faq

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/11/surveillance-program-got-you-yawning-here-s-why-you-should-worry.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-carp/should-i-care-about-nsa-surveillance_b_3461917.html

Contacting Rep. Goodlatte will do no good whatsoever. He's closely allied to the Koch Bros. and the Tea Party and is basically a worthless representative of the people. He cares nothing about our rights.

Did you post this elsewhere? I'd like to pass on your message but can't use this page with all the ads.

Darlene: As another columnist I read says about ISPs reading your email - You just aren't that interesting.

"...what do I care if the feds read my email?"

The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches and often requires police to get search warrants before encroaching on your privacy. Americans should be appalled that the government can snoop into their emails without such a warrant.

Thanks Bob for all of yuor detailed information
on e-mail encryption. Every bit that we can get
is always welcome, and a great help.

I've heard this tired argument so many times now, I can't believe people are still using it. To the Feds "law abiding" means not challenging their authority. So long as you're a non-thinking robocitizen, yeah, you're fine, Darlene. You wouldn't be writing emails interesting enough for anyone to read anyway. But if you're a Martin Luther King or someone fighting for change, you don't have to break any laws to raise their ire. You just have to oppose their endless wars, murders, and economic rape of the people. Do that, and then decide if you care whether the secret police state reads your emails.

I fear the public's stupidity in regards to government spying on them spells doom for our liberties. Among other problems, the spying led to the IRS illegally auditing the taxes for groups they deemed against the current administration. You had an agent spying on his ex-wife (not a terrorist). Multiply that by the thousands of agents with their ears to our communications and personal axes to grind. The government has SECRET courts to adjudicate cases involved in their spying. Once you relinquish your freedoms it will be impossible to reclaim them. Snowden is despised by all the POLITICIANS that passed these spying laws and is treated with disdain by the majority of the population and is exiled out of the country instead of being seen a a hero for trying to protect our LIBERTIES. These are liberties that our military has fought and DIED for so long to preserve. We’re not too far away from the point where the military will be protecting the government from its citizens (US - you and me). Shame on all of us.

It's quiet obvious that we have lost out privacy a long, long time ago, so why would I care about the government reading my email.

E-mail is treated so opposite to real mail, on paper. My first class mail is mine, interfering with the mail is a crime. Sending me unwanted offensive mail is another crime. Now I learn my private communications via e-mail are not private because they are stored on a server, the cloud. I fill up my own computer with mail back ups, too. I guess those are safe. But the rest is open to anyone, including law enforcement without a warrant.

Nothing to hide, that is a strange view in my mind. Privacy is an important right to me; I release my information as I wish to do so. And I know that many things I might write in the context of my personal life, could look totally different when plucked out randomly by someone looking for problems with me. I speak of other people in my life, and that makes my notes and letters a risk to them, too. That is not persuasive to me, nothing to hide.

E-mail is treated so opposite to real mail, on paper. My first class mail is mine, interfering with the mail is a crime. Sending me unwanted offensive mail is another crime. Now I learn my private communications via e-mail are not private because they are stored on a server, the cloud. I fill up my own computer with mail back ups, too. I guess those are safe. But the rest is open to anyone, including law enforcement without a warrant.

Nothing to hide, that is a strange view in my mind. Privacy is an important right to me; I release my information as I wish to do so. And I know that many things I might write in the context of my personal life, could look totally different when plucked out randomly by someone looking for problems with me. I speak of other people in my life, and that makes my notes and letters a risk to them, too. That is not persuasive to me, nothing to hide.

Free Encryption For Everyone
https://www.encryptfree.com/

Since you have nothing to hide, you will be OK with me walking into your home anytime I want and looking into anything I want whenever I want?

When I put MY TRASH at the curb it remain my property until picked up by the city, then it's their property. It the police want to search my trash they can not legally do so until it is in the hand of the city, or they get a warrant. My trash is not abandoned property. It is placed at my curb in the designated transfer point.

Leaders from both major political parties have purposely encroached on our privacy. They purposely delay passing the above acts because they still desire the power. I'm sure there are a few misguided useful tools who legitimately think we need things as they are to help fight terrorism. Instead of taking stabs at each other, let's work together to get the bills passed. I will today, how about you?

I have done the bare minimum: I contacted both the Congressman and the Senator. How about all you readers out there?

I see the phrase "just about anything you put online and thought was private" in this post.

Excuse me? Isn't that like saying "anything you leave in your driveway and thought nobody would see"?

Come on, people. If you want it to be treated as private, then keep it private. I taught computer networking for many years, and I always told my students to never put anything in an email that you wouldn't post on a bulletin board. Now people are actually posting things on virtual bulletin boards and yet they are still expecting them to be private. Yeah, right.

Bob, there is a way around this snooping. Just get an address from "ProtonMail.ch" and all is encrypted on both ends if the other user has a like address. If the other user has an address from say, MSN then the encryption is lost. ProtonMail is hosted in Switzerland and beyond the jurisdiction of US authorities and doesn't have the encryption key for your messages anyhow. Just thought I'd mention that.

Darlene: "Please tell me: if I am a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide, what do I care if the Feds read my email? "

If I'm a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, what do I care if the Feds break into my house while I'm out and go through my dresser, medicine cabinet, and snail mail? What do I care if they hack into my computer while they're there, and look at everything on that?

darlene: "Please tell me: if I am a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide, what do I care if the Feds read my email?"

really?! what keeps you from becoming a criminal is up to the discretion of the government.

putting it more plainly, what you do today that allows you to be a law abiding citizen one day may make you a criminal, or at the least worthy of being put on a watch list, the next day or a month down the road. all because they passed a law or executive order without your knowledge that criminalizes some thing or another that you do now. that's just the voice of idiocy.