House Passes E-mail Privacy Act
This bill is great in that email stored on your ISP's (or Google's) servers is treated identically to that on your computer at home-- they need to get a warrant. That's a great step forward. It isn't BS.<p>However, it doesn'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' private information is OK as long as a human doesn't read it.<p>"Full take" sounds incredible-- it entails recording and retaining EVERYTHING passing through the internet. But we know it'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'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'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's why it'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't making it trivial.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program)</a>