House Passes E-mail Privacy Act
This bill is great in that email stored on your ISP&#x27;s (or Google&#x27;s) servers is treated identically to that on your computer at home-- they need to get a warrant. That&#x27;s a great step forward. It isn&#x27;t BS.<p>However, it doesn&#x27;t address intercepting and recording communications in-transit, which is extremely commonplace these days. Technically american intelligence agencies need a warrant to eavesdrop on american citizens. But in practice, they can get around this by recording _everything_ (full take), indexing it, and limiting their searches against communications by US citizens where they either talk to a foreigner or match a search query on a nefarious keyword. [1]<p>They wave away violating the 4th amendment of the US constitution by saying that copying, storing, indexing, and searching through US citizens&#x27; private information is OK as long as a human doesn&#x27;t read it.<p>&quot;Full take&quot; sounds incredible-- it entails recording and retaining EVERYTHING passing through the internet. But we know it&#x27;s possible. Snowden revealed that the UK GCHQ has been doing it since at least 2013 with their Tempora system [2].  Snowden also revealed the NSA&#x27;s very similar XKeyscore system. At the time of his leaks, the NSA did not do Full Take... but that was several years ago.<p>It&#x27;s very reasonable to assume that everything, EVERYTHING, you do on the internet is recorded and stored by the government. This bill does not address that.<p>That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s absolutely critical that everything you do is end-to-end encrypted. These government agencies have the resources to crack most encryption, too [3] but at least you aren&#x27;t making it trivial.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;XKeyscore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;XKeyscore</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tempora" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tempora</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bullrun_(decryption_program)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bullrun_(decryption_program)</a>