Your email isn’t safe!!!

I came across this article on slashdot.org Government Has a Right to Read Your Email? which points to this article Lawsuit challenges government’s right to read your e-mail. The article covers the current lawsuit filed against the US Government by a seller (Steven Warshak) of the “natural male enhancement” products (Enzyte for those who haven’t seen the commercials). Basically Warshak is suing the government for reading his email without his permission, which (incidentally) is how they gathered evidence against him for their fraud case.

As the current laws stand the government must obtain a search warrant to go through an individual’s snail mail; however, email (it seems) is fair game. My personal opinion on this is that email should have the same protections as snail mail. I would go as far as to say that since it is illegal to intercept snail mail it should also be illegal to intercept email. By intercept I mean using any means to get a copy of an email as it travels through the system to it’s destination. The purpose of the laws protecting snail mail is to protect people’s right to privacy. People send the same sort of information through email as they do through snail mail: personal thoughts, ideas, etc. Those thoughts and ideas should be protected as they are private and generally meant to be seen only be the recipient.

As an example lets take a divorced couple with children, and the parent with primary custody chooses to keep his or her ex-spouse updated on the children’s well being by sending the other parent an email everyday letting him or her know how the kids are doing. That is private information and reading those emails is an invasion of privacy. You may try to make the argument that it is common knowledge that email is not a safe way to send sensitive or personal information. I am not arguing that point, only the point that the government should do everything in its power to make it a safe transport of information. You may also make the argument the person should use the phone instead as it is a more secure form of communication. Ok, in the event you didn't know, you can build a scanner to pick up phone conversations from cell phones etc; although I do believe this is illegal now, my point remains the same. The conversation can still be listened to.

In the end if the laws are not updated to keep up with the times we are destined to be stuck in a slower era. This is the computer age where everything is moving at the speed of light and information travels the globe in mere seconds. People should not have to depend on snail mail to get their sensitive information from one location to another.