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EFF Warns That Email Privacy Is In Jeopardy
MojoKid writes with this excerpt from HotHardware:
"According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a
dangerous legal precedent has just been set that can potentially unravel existing federal privacy protections for e-mail and Internet usage. The alert from the EFF is not just to sound a general warning, but it also takes the form of an Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, filed with the federal 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, asking for the court's legal finding to be overturned... The findings of this case
could become the foundation of a legal precedent upon which other similar cases can subsequently be based. If that were to be the case, then the unauthorized retrieving of e-mails from an e-mail server would not be considered a violation of the federal Wiretap Act, which
will then open the door for government-sponsored snooping."
Not to be flippant, but does anyone really believe there is any privacy anymore with simple, unencrypted email? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the EFF is on the case. But it does seem to me that any expectation of privacy in any communication medium here in the USA went out the window with the news of the NSA telco backdoors. Our government is obsessed with spying on everyone, and they have demonstrated quite thoroughly they don't care about the rules at all.
Caveat Utilitor
... to maintain your own mail server.
And how does maintaining your own email server help? Those outgoing mails are going to somewhere right? And the incoming ones arrived from somewhere? Then they're likely being transmitted in the plain somewhere along the line.
Unless you encrypt the messages themselves, you're on your own. Having your own mailserver, which I do, simply doesn't help with this problem.
Cheers,
Ian