Imagine the McCarthyism mindset combined with today's surveillance culture and the disaster that would be.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/04/30/baby-taken-from-par...
As for the OP comment about the grandkids and child porn - that was a front page story a few days ago on HN.
The "secret law" part is the one that really floors me. The FISA court orders are themselves secret. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. But knowledge of secret law is itself a crime.
America is now watched by secret police.
If your country is spying on you, it can use the data it gathers against you in a court, etc. If it's a foreign country, what could they possibly do?
Since you're not a citizen of that country, use the information in your email in far less scrupulous ways? Perhaps they could blackmail you into being a foreign intelligence asset. Perhaps a corrupt employee could slip your information to a criminal organization who will then steal your identity.
All of these things seem rather unlikely, and chances are you're equally boring to both governments. But your assumption that the government of a country you're not a citizen of will treat you better than the government of a country you are a citizen of seems pretty odd to me.
More generally, anything that nobody has ever seen happen is unlikely.
I have heard of many occurrences of a government profiling, targeting or even suing their citizens over national security. I have never heard of anyone having their identity stolen by a criminal organization who got it from a foreign nation's government.
If you are in danger from a foreign government reading your email, you are an employee of your own government.
Dulce et...
Yandex Mail is a great competitor to gmail, some things even work better -- you've got a separate list of thread's attachments, ability to unsubscribe from whole spam categories in one click, SMS (maybe only in russia) and so on
EDIT: How do we do it? By saving money on counter-intelligence! it's a win-win!
http://www.agentura.ru/english/experts/safranchuk/
That seems like a very healthy budget to me.
All jokes aside it's interesting to observe politics and technology interplay. But I'm not too excited I have to take part in some of the events.
I live in Russia and I don't think taxes here are low.
It bothers me as a progressive that many liberals don't see how we are a hop, skip and jump away from that mentality.
From birth to death there is going to be a record of your child's phone calls, friends, dates, etc. It will never be deleted.
Erich Mielke's mania for information: the long-time head of the Stasi, Mielke believed that "you have to know everything in order to be completely safe"
But in all seriousness... it seems to be a rather unfortunate reality of using FREE email service, that the actual level of privacy afforded to you is minimal. Russia has a very stringent set of anti-extremism laws that curb free speech big time. If your content is labeled extremist, it has to be taken down by an ISP via a swift court order. Note that the "court" is either a single judge or a small panel of judges making the decision. Under that set of laws.
The hosted paid services like Google Apps is another matter all together. There the privacy expectation should be extremely high... but who knows if that's really true.
Because, you know, routine software updates is just what the doctor ordered for on-demand installation of backdoors.
Remember how Google complained loudly about Chinese hackers breaking into a few Chinese dissidents' gmail accounts?
How pedestrian of them. The NSA is apparently far more efficient at that game.
I used to like it because it still had a lean, plain HTML no-frills interface, but I see they've added some JS interactivity to it (not much, though).
I thought they had an English version, but I can't find the link :) So all I'm seeing is Russian, which I cannot read.
Russia doesn't drone 'suspected' terrorists based on their meta data.
These are not photoshopped:
http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_01.jpg
Plus, it is a Russian tradition to wrap things in plastic before putting them in the parcel postal boxes.
