Is your email private?

Anyone on this blog ever

Anyone on this blog ever heard of Hushmail ? I am not tech savy but the service offered by this company is free encrypted email.

The only alternative is to

The only alternative is to encrypt private communications before they are submitted to the ISP. This is quite feasible but everyone will have to have the software, and standards must be established.

I don't think it matters whether the "save on server" box is checked. The government simply takes the backup tape of their choice from the ISP.

Martin McKeay indicated that

Martin McKeay indicated that our phone record files are private.

It seems that I recall during this past year the phone companies were giving the Bush government our phone records wholesale without any warrants or court approval.

And as for snail mail....all any government agents have to do is speak to the postal inspectors and as the saying goes...one hand washes the other.

Martin, what you have said

Martin, what you have said isn't true. For starters the SCA requires the government to get a warrant if the e-mail has not yet been read by the user. The SCA does not apply at all once the mail has been read. The reason the government can get read e-mail without a warrant is because the ISPs generally tell the user in the fine print of their service that the ISP will not guarentee privacy of anything saved on their service. In other words, the user isn't paying the ISP to keep something private they choose to store on the server, they are paying the ISP to supply mail services. The problem is that most users assume that "mail services" implies that the ISP has a responsibility to keep their stored stuff private.
As an ISP employee it continually amazes me that people expect the same level of privacy from a $9.95 a month dialup account that comes with a disclaimer that you aren't going to get privacy, that they get when they walk into the doctors office and lay out $200 to take off their clothes and get examined, after signing 5 forms that acknowledge the doctor is going to swear on a stack of Bibles a mile high to not disclose anything they find.
Frankly ISP's generally don't want users storing mail on their servers anyway, it consumes expensive disk space for one thing. And the solution to all of this is extremely simple - use POP3 as a mail protocol, download your mail to your PC via Outlook or other mail client, and don't check the "leave messages on the server" button in your Outlook settings (which in any case isn't checked by default)

Martin- good to see you

Martin- good to see you writing again. I agree with you, right or wrong, we should realize that we have no expectation of privacy in our emails. Whether it be from an employer, the government or someone else, if you write it, someone can get it. I have written further on this at my blog here