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The US Government Can (Lawfully) Read Your Emails

The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum

Here’s where I’m personally touched by this story: I met Jacob Applebaum (@ioerror) a few days ago. He was present in the Tunisia Arab bloggers meeting and gave very important workshops on security and online safety to Arab bloggers, dissidents and journalists who wanted to learn how to be anonymous online.

Now we wake up to read that the US federal government can lawfully read the emails some of us might have exchanged with him? What message will this send to the bloggers who were present in that meeting? The irony is that some of us thought he was excessively paranoid. Now we understand why.

4 thoughts on “The US Government Can (Lawfully) Read Your Emails”

  1. Nothing new in this item. The US government can intercept all electronic communications all over the world, be it phone calls, faxes and e-mails. Haven’t you heard of the Echelon system?

  2. Ironically – given Jihad’s comment — the “right to privacy” of this form is a purely US concept. It was first articulated by the (Jewish) Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissenting opinion in a 1928 case involving the use of wiretaps to convict an alcohol bootlegger during prohibition.

    Anyone seriously interested in this subject should read http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Thought-That-Hate-Biography/dp/046501819X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318275028&sr=8-1.

    But, the bottom line is that it is farcical to believe one could even have a serious discussion about the limits of any government’s power in this regard without understanding that this innovative right to any such privacy by an individual was first established by the US.

  3. I think the Lebanese public should be more educated as to the use of encryption on the web. It is possible to communicate quite securely on the Internet, provided you know what you’re doing. For instance very few people I know use encrypted chat or email, in spite of the fact there are fine applications for these, than can even work over gtalk or messenger (for example, pidgin and its various plugins). Those are good enough to prevent intelligence services from reading your mail, provided they don’t target you personally (otherwise, they could hack into your computer and read your stuff).
    Even that can be avoided: you only need two computers, one always offline and “air-gapped” and the other connected to the internet, and encryption/decryption always happens on the isolated computer.
    The applications I’m talking about would not be affected by security breaches such as the one that affected DigiNotar and led to the interception of the email messages of hundreds of thousands to people in Iran, nor would they be vulnerable to foreign eavesdropping. The only weakness of that scheme is that as long as only few people use it, it is always possible for intelligence services to identify who’s using them, capture them and torture them into surrendering their info.

  4. You have nothing to worry about if you’re innocent (of doing whatever it is that the U.S. government does not like).

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