Let me briefly talk about politics and why the feds will never win in controlling the public. The president signed a piece of legislature making it legal for the united states postal service to search and confiscate a person's mail. Why? Who knows... who cares. The point is that GWB is taking the "if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about" stance a bit too far... and it's going to bite SOMEONE in the ass, but it won't be the public techies.

What does this mean for the United States Postal Server? Essentially, that the president is all for it going out of business in favor of other post mediums (FedEx, UPS, etc). If the choices are between the USPS (which will open, read, possibly never deliver your post) and FedEx (who will soon publicly state "We won't read your mail and we won't give it to the feds without a warrant!"), the smart public will chose FedEx. However, this is a slippery slope that started with phone taps, as many will recall. When the government starts spying on the public, the public starts retaliating in kind.

Here's the thing, if the government ever DID (and it's unlikely being as moronic an idea as it would be) start reading our emails, then the techies would start (already do) encrypting their emails with public/private keys so that only the intended receiver could read the email. This is NOT to say that the email would be private and the government would be forced into say "awe, shucks... guess we can't read that one," but rather they could (after serious decryption) eventually get the contents of the email, but presumably the data would be so non-helpful that such measures would be futile. Wait what? Oh... see, if EVERYONE uses high level public-key encryption, then decrypting every message (to see who it's from, what the body is, etc) would take a ridiculous amount of computing power to crack.

Long-story-short: the government can only spy on people who they do not want to spy on. That is to say, if you don't have anything to hide... hide it anyway. Why? To conceal the people who do have something to hide. Also, in case you want something to hide later. Oh, and lastly, to say a nice big "fuck you" to the government who feel like shitting on the Constitution is completely okay.