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Support for U.S. Mandatory Data Retention Laws
chill wrote to mention a C|Net article about an upswell in support for a mandatory data retention policy here in the U.S. From the article: "Top Bush administration officials have endorsed the concept, and some members of the U.S. Congress have said federal legislation is needed to aid law enforcement investigations into child pornography. A bill is already pending in the Colorado State Senate. Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months."
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Politician: "Hey, we gained access to mail server logs for suspect A, let's see what else other people are up to... Hey lookie here, my political rival's internet activities..."
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
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They want to prosecute child porn offenders? Fine. Put it in the text of the law. Retain the data, but make it unusable in court except for child porn cases.
Then tell all the privacy watchdogs to go back and chew their bones.
Fragging my father since 2004
My first thought on seeing this article was... "is this a joke"?
I'm not sure... data should be retained to a certain extent, however, that data should not be arbitrarily available to governments and companies. And at the moment, i don't trust that it wouldn't be.
FanFictionRecs.net
Yeah, it's only about catching the child pornographers. It won't be used for wholesale fishing expeditions to see if anyone might be doing something else illegal or who might be saying things that don't sit well.
Just like the government won't use the list of passengers who fly to trawl for people who might be doing something suspicious like buying a one-way ticket.
No, it's always about the children.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
In conservative America, you don't delete email, email deletes you!
Curiosity killed the cat, but cats have 9 lives.
How long till the US goverment mandates that all data, whether from phonelines, email, searches, etc, has to be maintained on government servers for safe storage. I'm being totally serious. First they use child porn and incidents on myspace to scare people... then once they get their foot in the door, its just a matter of time. It truly is scary. Wheneve I talk of stuff like this I am deemed a conspiracy nut or something similiar.
http://religiousfreaks.com/We should insure that we make this data gathering absolutely as broad as possible, so that there will be so much data that none of us can function. This will make it obvious that total control over the flow of information and total access to petabytes of emails and phone taps of my pizza order - to a pizzaria run by an Arab with a second cousin on an Al-Quaida cell phone call history - DON"T aid law enforcement. At all. Then maybe when we come to our senses we can take back control of our government from the paranoids on both sides of the political spectrum and do something sensible.
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
Damn child-pornography... Our records are being held because of them!
See? These two concepts are examples of overarching legislation. Its an idiotic and rather insulting attempt from our government to lower our personal privacy in the name of nabbing niche crime markets.
One concern I immediately had -- and I happily saw noted in the article as well -- is the question of who will pay to support this? Data storage isn't free, or cheap.
This could kill small and medium-sized web hosting providers.
Nuff said. They claim this law is 'for the children', but it's going to be used for everything else possible.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I would say that the inability of many slashdotters to spell correctly is a much more serious problem to worry about. I won't even go into the issue of incorrectly extrapolating statistics based on your little slice of heaven on earth, or the morality of using said statistics to justify a police state in the name of saving the children.
I wonder how long it's still legal to abuse children as the excuse for some law.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>
> No wait... I meant CHINA!
In Soviet Russia, citizens delete emails!
Whenever I see "let's push through this law to protect the children" I always assume it is bad legislation. You know that it's especially bad when "child porn" is used as the justification for taking away privacy rights. Basically, "we can't even make up a semi-clever story to hide our ulterior motives... time to play the Sicko Child Pornographer Card!"
Why should we be trying to catch them?
Should we be trying to catch online predators? You're asking if we should be trying to catch the guys who use the internet to setup meeting to have sex with children? Umm...
If you just talking about the freaks who wack off to pics of little girls, then think of this: People searching for pics of little kids creates a demand for pics of little kids. If the demand is there, then someone posts pics of little kids. Where do you think this pics come from? People sexually absuing and exploiting little kids and posting pictures of them online.
Pure freedom is nice and all in theory, but when people are still too uncivilized to handle it, then it's unrealistic.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
other question is when can I delete e-mail or files? if I have a draft and delete it before the backup am i in violation of this policy or what?
I think this is just a good case of lawmakers who have absolutely no clue on how to turn on their computer let alone regulate data retention or laws regarding any of this stuff.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Based on recent news events those guys seem to be experts on all things "pedo". ;P I'm sure they'd LOVE to "investigate" more kiddie porn.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
After all, many such things if done by postal service are yet another crime.
If this goes through I say quit fighting spam. Let it start clogging up the archive mechanisms. When the pain is large enough these privacy violations go away. I'd rather get spam I can filter than have my traffic/email/etc. mandated to be stored where it is rapidly available and providing a big-ass target for crackers and bureaucrats looking for a cause to raise their pay or get votes on.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I have the sneaking suspicion that it is mostly a bunch of creepy old men talking dirty to a bunch of other creepy old men. I find it really hard to believe some teenage girl is seriously engaging in these sorts of activities (I can imagine them doing it and thinking it is funny to rattle peoples cages, but seriously being pulled in to this kind of relationship?).
As to your specific question, 'how are they supposed to catch these people without the logs'.
No one has ever suggested that we record every minute of our voice communications over the phone or otherwise for use in these sorts of cases. Why would text be any different? I would support the ability to get a warrant to 'tap' irc or email, allowing law enforcement to log communication from the point of the warrant onwards, it seems like that would be pretty effective in building evidence against offenders while keeping the government out of the business of innocent citizens.
Is there anyway that we can limit what the government knows about what we do online? I spend most of my time online, be it browsing the web, sending an essay back and forth over wires, or IMing friends, there is way more information the government is storing about us than there ever was before. There are plenty of things that I have done on the net that I don't want some ultra-right-wing creep looking through. It wouldn't be that hard to realy stop them in their tracks. Can't you just make some realy big anonomyzer for your town? That way no personally Identable information goes out to the global wires?
There are real problems with the IP monopolies though. Lol, I wonder if this is encoraged by the government, maybe some kind of reward for their carnivore project.
Btw, "ultra-right-wing creeps" isn't just irrational name-calling, just read some of the stuff from Russ Tice, and why he was fired.
From another slashdotter:
"In 1999, I worked as a contract engineer for a Linux consulting company. We delivered kernel enhancements for the Linux kernel on the Alpha processor to the NSA. The enhancements we to reduce TLB miss overhead when doing comparisons and searches on large amounts of data. The benchmark run to test it was a keyword search through a stream of e-mails. This was to run on a *massive* cluster of Alpha machines. I would guess they've upgraded it several times since then.
1999 was while Clinton was still president, BTW.
(Posted anonymously, for obvious reasons. Though I've probably given enough information that they could narrow it down to about 10 people.) "
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Encryption is the answer to this, and it continues to amaze me that otherwise intelligent software developers continue to create software that does not utilize encryption.
95% of web traffic continues to be by HTTP, instead of the easily deployed HTTPS (and by easily I mean the entire infrastructure to support it already exists, both for clients and servers).
SMTP continues to be plaintext and bounced around like a ping-pong ball. The reasons for using encryption with SMTP are the same reasons for using letters in envelopes and not postcards. Two thousand years ago the Romans used wax seals on their private documents to ensure no one intercepted the message en route, yet every email on the planet is still there to be read.
Instant Messages continue not to be encrypted between recipients, and just like HTTPS the infrastructure is already there to support it. Why is it that it is off by default in a world where you can't buy a system with anything less than a 2+ GHz Celeron processor?
VoIP continues to go unencrypted over the Internet, for reasons that I can't even begin to fathom. We expect to have digital wireless phone calls--on a system first deployed over ten years ago--encrypted, but the brand new digital wired calls not? Thank God there are people like Phil Zimmerman out there.
Seriously, this is the most basic concept in an age where the people have every right to fear their government that most people distrust and believe is corrupt, in an age where the government (allegedly) mandates that all Internet traffic is made available for illegal spying, in an age where people have feared the NSA was already spying on citizens... the list goes on.
It is the responsibility and social responsibility of programmers and standards-makers to pursue wide encryption deployment, or the whole "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of speech away from the Internet?" cliche will be answered with "With my shoulder to the wall helping the government take away everything else."
The correct method is for the authorities to inform the ISP that an investigation is underway. At that point, they are required to start retaining logs for the eventual subpeona. Logs are not turned over without a court order.
This has been effective in the past and there is no evidence to support the notion it is no longer a valid method.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I know police who catch these bastards. Either you're so distant from reality that you think people don't really do evil things and it's all just "Big Brother"'s fault, or you just don't want the police to find your underage porn collection.
So... which is it?
You're missing the point. I think people do evil things all the time. I also think the police should do their best to catch criminals within a legal system that balances the rights and freedoms of an individual against being given carte blanche. The authorities are perfectly capable of pursuing online sex offenders without mandatory data retention laws. The US government is already abusing the Patriot Act, and AT&T apparently has plugged a pipe directly into the NSA, so you'll have to excuse me for blaming "Big Brother" and being somewhat hesitant to hand over yet another power to the state. This law has nothing to do with catching child porn offenders and everything to do with the government finding another way to exert more control over the general populace. You must be "distant from reality" if you think otherwise.Is child porn really as rampant and great a concern as they make it out to be?
Not by a long shot. Child porn is a gross violation of the rights of the child being used to make it. The violation continues through the continued proliferation of the materials.
Is it rampant? No one knows. For all we know, there could simply be a pool of say, 1000, images that are simply being recycled via digital copying over and over. No one has any hard data on this. We know nothing, yet laws are being drafted, essentially on the basis of rhetoric.
Is it that big of a concern? Well, for the person directly involved, it may become the biggest concern in their entire lives, and possibly the biggest concern in the lives of their loved ones too. They are still being violated in a very real sense. Depending on the circumstances, some might be able to cope with this others might not.
Is it that big of a concern for the rest of society? Well, yes. I am personally offended that people's rights are violated in this way. Those responsible deserve to face justice and the judgement of their peers under the law. Like all sex crimes, everyone can agree something needs to be done.
But should everyone elses rights be violated in order to "do something"? Will this even work? Should more people suffer because of what has been done to the victims? I, and most Slashdotters, realise that we should have our rights forsaken or violated in response to the violation of others. Rather, we should use the law as it surrently stands to both protect people and bring the guilty to justice. It is up to the task.
I would like to think victims of sex abuse would agree with my sentiment that the rights of everyone shouldn't have to be lost or violated in response the the violation of the rights of the victims. But I don't know that this is the case. I would like to hear the opinions of an actual victim of either child sex abuse or child pornography, on all of this. What do the people for whom these laws are suppossedly made for actually think about them?
In all this, I don't think I've ever even heard the voice of the victim. Even once.
May the Maths Be with you!
The problems with your little analysis are that:
Pure freedom is nice and all in theory, but when people are still too uncivilized to handle it, then it's unrealistic.
You misspelled fascist .
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The GP was quoting from this post, which was posted anonymously.
d =15083841
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182479&ci
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Back that up with facts, Jack.
Prove to me that every picture of little kids is exploitation. For every picture there is always some doubt as to (1) who took the picture, (2) the actual age of the person(s) in the picture, (3) when the picture was taken, and (4) whether or not there are even real people in the picture.
Look at it this way: Assume there is a demand for underage pictures. If you wish to fill this demand, you can (1) force young kids to pose for you, (2) find somebody that LOOKS young, but is old enough so you don't get busted, or (3) use some creative ability to otherwise simulate underage pictures realistically. Which choice has the most risk? Which choice(s) can cover your ass?
Hustler makes money selling "Barely Legal" videos of people that LOOK young, but are above the legal age to be in such pictures. This is not exploitation (unless you call ALL forms of pornography exploitation, in which case "doing it for the children" doesn't come into play) but playing on people's fantasies.
Throwing out a statement like, "If the demand is there, then someone posts pics of little kids. Where do you think this pics come from? People sexually absuing and exploiting little kids and posting pictures of them online" is simply marching to the mantra of those that would have you nodding your head to their own agenda.
Not every form of nudity is pornography, and it should not be treated as such. Mindlessly spewing the company line and saying "It's just for the children!" is playing into the hands of people that want to do much more sinister things with your privacy.
So, let's assume that you're not a child pornographer. However, if the government goes on a fishing expedition looking for child pornographers and, lo and behold, finds an email about how you cheat on your income taxes, do you think the government is going to shrug over your indiscretion?
Of course not!
Giving the government the right to search you and your data at any time for any reason "in the name of child pornography" automatically keeps the barn door open for any and every kind of reprehensible violation of your civil rights.
Just like saying that the government has the right to tap any phone lines it wants without a warrant is justified because terrorism is such a bad thing and we need to prevent it.
I thought that Americans were against prior restraint!
Without any special powers, the government successfully foiled a few plots against America before 9/11... the Millenium Plot comes immediately to mind.
However, we didn't catch the 9/11 hijackers. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE! Monday Morning Quarterbacking shows that there were clues, but "nobody connected the dots." Why do Americans now happily give powers of prevention to the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other government agencies now? These agencies were PREVENTED from sharing data due to abuses during the 1970s (remember Watergate?).
However, if you fight against these new government powers, the government automatically accuses you of being on the side of terrorists.
It's the same thing with Child Pornography.
Let them take an inch in the name of the children, and you've given up just about every basic freedom you thought you enjoyed.
Our president uses the Constitution as a replacement for toilet paper, and you are willing to give the government EVEN MORE POWERS?
How stupid are you?
I realize that calmness and reason are routinely shouted down when this topic is being discussed, but the parent is so insightful it clearly deserves a 5 rating.
I know police who catch these bastards. I think we should initiate a policy of constant video surveillance of all households with children, not to mention legally mandated implantation of RFID devices in all children under the age of 18 so we can monitor their whereabouts 24/7/365. I think we should have checkpoints at every entrance/exit on the highways, and require proper paperwork to allow transport of a child through those checkpoints. I think we should make illegal all photographic record of children other than officially approved school photos. In addition, we should require prospective parents to get a license to have children, with a mandatory background check for criminal tendencies and liberalism.
If you don't support these policies, you must believe that nothing bad ever happens to children, or you must bugger children in your basement. Which is it?
Thinking outside my Head
While I agree that online predators should be punished, can you answer this simple question:
Why are the children at risk online in an unsupervised environment?
You wouldn't leave your kids alone with free access to guns or alcohol.
You wouldn't leave your kids alone a room with a dangerous animal.
You wouldn't drop your kids off in the middle of a sex trade region.
Any of the above would get you in trouble with the law, but putting a kid online in an unsupervised environment is tantamount to putting them in a room with the predator. People need to realise this and take responsibility for their *own* actions before running off to the gov'mint to solve their problems.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
An old man, once tall and proud, now tired and beaten, slumped in his chair, speaks one last time to his grandchildren. He hopes, in vain, that they will hear, and understand, and that maybe something will change.
He knows, deep down, it never will.
He speaks.
"Once, we were free. We didn't really know it; we took it for granted. We assumed that people would always do the right thing, in the end. We thought that people loved freedom as much as we did, we just quibbled over the details.
"If you ask me the day we lost our freedom, I won't be able to answer you. That's because it didn't happen on one day; we didn't lose a war, we didn't pass a Tyranny Act, we didn't plunge into economic chaos and come out of it a dictatorship. No, we lost our freedom in pieces, bit by bit, and with each piece we said, "We're doing it for our safety, and for our children's future. We're doing it for the children, we're doing it for ourselves and our posterity. We're doing it because we think it's right."
I remember when we could buy a CD and listen to it wherever we wanted. You think I'm crazy, don't you kids? You've never even dreamt of such a thing. But it's true, and I got to live it. Oh for a few short years, I got to live it.
"I remember when I could record my favorite TV shows on my computer and watch them over and over again. You can't do that anymore though; after the Content Rights Act of 2011, it became illegal to possess any content on your machine that you didn't pay for every time you watch it. Or if you preferred, you could accept RIAA-approved AdWare to display advertisements at predetermined intervals as you watched your recording.
"I remember when I knew that my privacy was protected, that the government needed a reason to search my private data for wrongdoing - remember the 5th Amendment kids? You learned about that in history class right? Remember what year it was appealed? 2012, good, you've been studying.
"I remember trusting my government and my elected officials. I remember not being afraid of everything I did, because I knew I lived in the land of the free. I remember being proud that my country upheld personal liberties above corporate power and the rule of politicians. But alas, I didn't realize I was free.
"And so it is gone. Each time a freedom was taken away, I did nothing. I sat and accepted it, because I had my own things to worry about. I had to go to work, and clean the house, and pay the bills, and throw in some vacations. I didn't have time to consider revolt. I didn't have time to remember that our Founding Fathers revolted for far lesser grievances than have been visited upon the world these days.
"Remember my words, kids, because it's illegal now to speak of them. You won't find them in books, or in emails, or on television or in music - those are all sanctioned now, only approved content can be delivered in them - I remember that too.. TV used to be so interesting.. until someone said "Think of the children." Even cable TV can't have cuss words now. You probably don't even know any, do you? Too bad. A good swear can really take the pressure off once in awhile.
Only one thing will change the world, kids, and it ain't talk. Have the courage to stand up for your freedoms - your freedom of thought, your freedom of speech, your freedom of action, and your freedom to live without fear.
Remember this:
The worst they can do to you is take your life.
The worst you can do to them is destroy their civilization.
I think a few lives are worth it."
And with that, he died.
What happens next? It's up to you.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
The local police department (Keene, NH) has an officer who focuses almost exclusively on child predators. No data retention, no warrantless eavesdropping, no sneak&peek searches. He just logs into a chat room with a teenage-sounding screenname and waits. It doesn't take him that long before someone is offering to meet, send bus tickets to him, or sending pornographic materials to him. They arrange a meeting place near Keene and pick up the predator when he arrives. Simple, straightforward sting work that's netted nearly 400 arrests in the last few years. Occasionally they get search warrants for the guy's computers if he sent a large amount of porn to the cops and add that to the charges, but they have more than probable cause for that search warrant.
It seems that certain politicians want to automate this basic police work by casting a wide net and filtering for certain phrases or activities and eliminate the pesky payroll obligations. Same thing with cameras on street corners and traffic lights - why pay some cop what an image-matching algorithm, face-recognition system, or radar gun will do for free?
Zero tolerance equals zero intelligence
Having encryption will do nothing to save you from this sort of snooping. They can retain records for later, encrypted or not. The explicit goal of cryptography isn't to prevent people from reading your encrypted messages, its to stop them from doing it in a timely fashion. Any method of encryption short of say, a private cypher, can be eventually cracked.
Now someone will probably make a point about a 4096 bit key to make the effort take years, but consider this: how long ago would a 64 bit key been considered sufficient?
The solution here is to simply stomp this initiave flat before it gains traction. The government does not have a need or right to know what you are doing.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
So when I look at child porn I should fire up one of my free encrypted SSH proxies first?
Oh wait, the government can't force the server i'm tunneling to, outside of the US, to retain any data... I suppose we better wrap a firewall around our country and not let those damn foreigners access to our internet.
Why don't we just all move to china instead?
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
From TFA:
At a hearing last week, Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who heads a House oversight and investigations subcommittee, suggested that data retention laws would be useful to police investigating crimes against children.
Your point about blancing privacy rights against government protection is well stated, sir. If everyone would just wear a gps neck collar, we could track everyone's movements 24/7. Manditory fingerpinting and DNA collection would solve quite a number of crimes, and having a sizeable secret police force, you could monitor the activites of many social, religious, and political organizations. These are simple facts. The closer you watch people, the more crimes you can catch.
However, what these dimmwits in washington don't seem to get, is that nobody would want to live in a country that was like that. People don't excactly flock to police states, begging to emigrate...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If you're going to hijack an airliner and kill thousands of people with it, I don't think that the obstruction of justice charge over burning your hard drive is really going be the biggest of your fears. The thing you have to remember about any of these sorts of controls is that the people you're trying to catch are *already committing criminal acts*. If someone is committing a real crime (that is, doing something that actually directly hurts someone), being charged for a victimless crime is really not that big a deal.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Let's come up with another law no individual is going to want to follow if they don't want to. Drug Laws - if someone wants to do drugs, they do them - period. Wasted enforcement. Seat Belt laws - if someone doesn't wear their seatbelt - they don't. Wasted enforcement. Prostitution laws - if someone wants a hooker, they get one. Wasted enforcement. Remember the sodomy laws, it was illegal to be gay?! Now the government wants to come out with 'Privacy Laws' - if someone wants to be private, they will. Not only wasted enforcement, but yet another cut into personal freedoms, just like the above laws. Imagine how much better the country would be if we took the 'drug war' money and used it for education and free substance abuse treatment? Have you ever tried to find an open bed in a rehab? It's not possible for less than $6 grand a month! The affordable and state sponsored beds are usually a 3-6 week wait, if not more. Picture the amount of taxes they could generate off taxing pot - an easy extra 250-500 BILLION a year. ($2+ a joint tax x 1 per day times 365 days x 20 million users). Tax prostitutes and make another 200 billion or more... Bye Bye deficit. This is a FREE country (except you pay taxes lol), as long as you do not harm another person PERSONALLY, then you should be free to do as you please. Our congress, an uneducated public and 'fear' have led to the slow and increasingly often removal of freedoms one after another - all 'to protect us' ?? Why are we still continuing to let this happen?
actually, the requiring people to get licensed before they have kids part of all that sounds like a pretty good idea. There're a lot of stupid people having a lot of stupid kids out there. The kind of stupid people that would allow all of the rest of that to pass.
my pet machine
I will note that recently the supreme court invoked the commerce clause to strike down a federal law as unconstitional for the first time in like 40 years just recently.
They have shown a willingess to pretty much say that ANYTHING you do could have an effect on interstate commerce.
Sadly this means that the limitation of powers is essentially null and void and the only way to strike these down is to find that they are contrary to something else.... because the commerce clause has now been interpreted to mean the gov can pretty much do anything... and the 9th ammendment aparently has little to no meaning either.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
My point is about pedophilia, and that another poster suggested that the problem be ignored.
NOBODY has said that the problem be ignored. What I have said is that we do not need to criminalize behaviours that are not directly harmful. The act of making child porn is where the harm occurs so that is where the crime should be defined.
1) ok, virtual porn. Well, we have virtual kiddie porn and it is legal. Guess what? The real kiddie porn is still being manufactured.
Is it? Got proof? Compare the rates of creation before and after digital manipulation became easy enough to make the fake stuff. You wave your hands an AWFUL lot when it comes to supporting your beliefs.
2) That is a ridiculous example. You know that the internet thrives on new content. Just look at the outcry here when a dupe article is posted. A lifelong pedophile won't be happy with the same thousand pictures, and you know it.
"The Internet" is NOT the same thing as online market for kiddie porn. Again you are waving your hands and making all kinds of specious conclusions.
When you start advocating for the criminilization of what amounts to a thought crime, you really, really need to have your ducks in a row. Especially since these laws are really the first widespread thought crimes in the history of the USA.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If I write an email to my wife asking her to invite the neighbors over for dinner, how does that qualify as interstate commerce?
Well, you must not be very familiar with the way that the (commercial) email system works. Even if the source and destination were within the same building, your email message could easily have crossed several state (and possibly national) boundaries.
To start with, the DNS request to locate the destination quite likely involved an access to a root- or second-level server, and it was probably in another state.
Also, unless both ends are unix-type systems and are running their own email servers (forbidden by most ISPs in the US but still done sometimes), your email probably went to your ISP's email server, which is likely to be in another state. Then it went to your wife's ISP's email server, which is likely in yet another state (unless you have the same ISP).
Look at the list of Received: lines in your email headers sometimes. You might be surprised where your messages are travelling. It's a lot worse than all the jokes about "I went to Chicago but my luggage went to Paris." A message from St. Louis to Chicago could easily go via a machine in Hong Kong.
And every one of those Received: lines represents a machine that could have cached a copy of your message for later perusal by "national security" software.
When I hit the Submit button, this message will probably go through a router in New York, though I'm in a suburb of Boston. I know this because I've traced some of the paths through my ISP (speakeasy.net). This is true even if the destination is in the Boston area, or even in the same town.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.