> When I sign up for an email account I expect my emails to be private, between me and the people I exchange them.
That's foolish. Ever since it was introduced people knew that email was not private. You should expect that everything you put anywhere is going to be read by spies. That's why spies exist; to gather information.
You use that as part of your risk assessment.
"Will I be sentenced to death or torture if this document is discovered?"
"Will I go to jail if this document is discovered?"
"Will my company lose business if this document is discovered?"
"Will I be embarrassed if my terrible teen-angst poetry is found?"
Then you decide how much effort you're going to use to hide the information, or the source of the information, or both.
While it's right that governments shouldn't be wasting money slurping the data of everyone it's unlikely to be an argument that the public will win any time. And even when there are laws "They" will find a lawyer to tell them that what they're doing is legal, and no-one ever gets to take them through court to show that it isn't. Oversight fails. You should assume a well-funded government is reading everything[1] all the time. I suspect that makes more of a difference if you're in $Oppressive_Regime than in the US or UK.
And if people really did care why would they dump so much stuff onto Facebook?
[1] see the mistakes that people make with creating encryption products, and using those products, it's probably a good idea to assume you've made a mistake and this government can read everything even if you encrypt it.
> "You should expect that everything you put anywhere is going to be read by spies."
I assume this is hyperbole, but even if it is, the whole point is that we shouldn't have to live in a world where this assumption is anywhere close to valid. The spies, after all, are paid for by taxpayer dollars.
> "You should assume a well-funded government is reading everything[1] all the time. I suspect that makes more of a difference if you're in $Oppressive_Regime than in the US or UK."
The latter sentence might be reassuring today, but since both countries are building the infrastructure of a surveillance state today, who's to say that years from now living in the US or the UK will be any different than living in Myanmar or Saudi Arabia? Better to prevent the infrastructure from being built in the first place than to trust that it will be used responsibly by a government which fundamentally has no incentive to do so.
> "And if people really did care why would they dump so much stuff onto Facebook?"
Maybe they just don't understand how their shared info can be used against them by governments, advertisers, etc? People were up in arms when some employers started demanding passwords to their FB accounts. That indicates that people understand on some level that their FB data can be used against them.
You knew, and technologists knew. I'm not sure how many "ordinary" people knew how email worked.
The closest analogy in the physical world is a letter. We have an expectation that won't be opened. Unless educated otherwise, a lot of people transfer that expectation directly.
Cf. mark zuckerberg's early amazement that people would enter all kinds of information into facebook
A better comparison would be a postcard. And in fact, many years ago I was advised just that: treat email as being as private as a postcard. Most likely, nobody besides the intended recipient will bother to read it, but a number of people could read it.
For as much as folks half my age are purported to understand technology, I think we may have received better general instruction in using the internet in years gone by... or maybe we were just more wary of it, knowing that we didn't understand all of the implications.
> The closest analogy in the physical world is a letter. We have an expectation that won't be opened. Unless educated otherwise, a lot of people transfer that expectation directly.
The closest analogy is a postcard, and that's the analogy that is often used.
> We have an expectation that won't be opened.
But you don't send cash through the mail, because you know that even though there are strict laws in place people do steal cash from mail. We expect that valuable stuff is vulnerable. We send it by courier, with insurance, with tamper-evident seals. Or we put it in a locked case and give it to an employee to take. Or we put it in a diplomatic bag.
People just don't think their letter to Auntie Flo is as valuable as a $10 bill. It's a shame they need to start protecting all their information, but they can't really say they weren't warned.
> "The closest analogy is a postcard, and that's the analogy that is often used."
Yes, the closest analogy is a post card. No, I do not believe it was the one used most often. Perhaps now it is, but not in the early days. Sending letters is the most common analogy I've come across and every icon, graphic, etc related to email has reinforced that view (it's even called mail). It's reasonable to assume that non-tech people using email today have based their assumption on a false analogy.
> "People just don't think their letter to Auntie Flo is as valuable as a $10 bill."
Following on from my point above, people have a reasonable expectation that their mail isn't being opened and scanned by default. That's why it's ok to send letter to Auntie Flo complaining about your boss etc. No-one is making value judgements the way you describe every time they hit 'send'.
"Whoever takes any letter, postal card, or package out of any post office or any authorized depository for mail matter, or from any letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any post office or authorized depository, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was directed, with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or opens, secretes, embezzles, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." [1]
> "... but they can't really say they weren't warned."
When were they warned and how? By all those people from the past? Weren't those folks lumped in the same category as alien abductees and conspiracy theorists?
> "You should expect that everything you put anywhere is going to be read by spies. That's why spies exist; to gather information"
That's ridiculous. It seems like you're condoning mass-surveillance by saying "It's their job". Doesn't the government get to tell them what their job is and don't we get to tell our government what we think?
You make two assumptions:
1. all spies work for a government
2. government employees follow all the rules and guidelines. that is, they follow the law themselves.
Ever since it was introduced people knew that email was not private
Why is it called "mail"? Why use passwords? Both connotate very specific degrees of privacy. Social signals and technical hackability are not per-se comparable benchmarks for 'privacy expectations'.
I knew it was sent plaintext across a bunch of networks, some of which I directly paid to carry my traffic.
I did not expect that every single one was slurped and stored by my own government, particularly in cases where it doesn't even cross any national boundaries.
Not even when Duncan Campbell told you about ECHELON in 199?
I'm still struggling to understand why GHCQ having a 3 day cache is so much worse than all the other privacy violating stuff that goes on. (I am annoyed by the failure of oversight; by the weird wriggling around laws; and if anything I'm more annoyed that they have all this information and don't appear to be using it to lock up criminals.)
But I'm not that* worried about GCHQ. I wouldn't be able to afford the steel blast door if I was worried about a well funded government agency getting my stuff, and I know that merely saying "it's illegal" isn't a strong protection against bad actors.
I'm a lot more worried about my local council. GCHQ hasn't done anything to me. (And is unlikely to, unless I marry a journalist working with government secrets.) But my local council will invade my privacy - they used to sell CCTV camera footage to tv shows; they spy on homes to assess school entry or parking permit validity; they do a bunch of unsavoury stuff.
I'm worried about the records my doctor holds, because there are risks of people losing memory sticks or giving information out to other people over the phone or not destroying hard drives correctly, or of staff gossiping (or being corrupted with bribes).
> In an astonishing breach of security BT Cellnet has handed out, over the telephone, a confidential pin number allowing the recipient to listen in to the confidential messages of any of the five million customers on their network.
> The Independent on Sunday has that pin number and yesterday was able to hack into the message systems of 15 people. Their permission was obtained in advance.
I'm worried about all that stuff too, particularly the unified database they were talking about under ID cards, with hundreds of thousands of busybodies having access.
I'm just saying that while I knew it was trivially easy to read email just by sniffing the wire, while I knew that they could do this and probably were, that doesn't mean that I expect that sort of behaviour from a democratic government or that that expectation amounts to a sort of implicit permission to treat the data as public.
For a counterpoint - email from government departments comes with footer text claiming it private and confidential!
I think we are probably using expect in slightly different, nuanced ways. I may expect that they do it (in the sense I think it's likely) because I'm a realist and also a cynic. But in other ways I don't expect it (in the sense I don't think it's reasonable behaviour).
A large percentage of email is never sent in plaintext. Few senders use external relays, and the overwhelming majority of mail is sent directly from sender MTA to recipient MTA. Most recipient MTAs support and encourage TLS.
Of course this is a "probably" type of thing, but just worth noting. Assume it's plaintext, but it probably isn't.
Some people in some countries have always had to ask themselves this question.
Typewriters were licenced equipment in some places; "They" would take a sample of type so they could link documents back to the licence holder.
Luckily, for the vast majority of people and the vast majority of documents the answer to "will I be killed or tortured if this document is discovered" is "no", even in the US.
That's foolish. Ever since it was introduced people knew that email was not private. You should expect that everything you put anywhere is going to be read by spies. That's why spies exist; to gather information.
You use that as part of your risk assessment.
"Will I be sentenced to death or torture if this document is discovered?"
"Will I go to jail if this document is discovered?"
"Will my company lose business if this document is discovered?"
"Will I be embarrassed if my terrible teen-angst poetry is found?"
Then you decide how much effort you're going to use to hide the information, or the source of the information, or both.
While it's right that governments shouldn't be wasting money slurping the data of everyone it's unlikely to be an argument that the public will win any time. And even when there are laws "They" will find a lawyer to tell them that what they're doing is legal, and no-one ever gets to take them through court to show that it isn't. Oversight fails. You should assume a well-funded government is reading everything[1] all the time. I suspect that makes more of a difference if you're in $Oppressive_Regime than in the US or UK.
And if people really did care why would they dump so much stuff onto Facebook?
[1] see the mistakes that people make with creating encryption products, and using those products, it's probably a good idea to assume you've made a mistake and this government can read everything even if you encrypt it.