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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's still a conspiracy theory that the government is reading all your email!

Wasn't it proven they tap most if not all internet backbones? If so, they can (like all ISP's together) read all unencrypted email, and most email is still sent unencrypted.

I don't really care about the difference between their "collecting" (= processed by a human) and regular human's collecting (getting it on gov't controlled storage media), fact is they have built the infrastructure to do just what that theory claims, have incentives to do it and no disincentives to not do it.

You call it a conspiracy theory, I call it a "very likely to be true" theory.

It is also a likely target of media manipulation. It's not quite the same as saying "evolution is just a theory", but maybe that's just because secularism is so popular now.

I'm not sure you can call government itself a conspiracy.

There is in fact no evidence that the government (any government) is "reading all our emails", or has had the access to do that. There is, on the other hand, a virulent conspiracy theory that the PRISM disclosures from Snowden revealed NSA's ability to do that; that claim was so false that Greenwald now (somewhat deceptively) denies he even acknowledged it.

Unless I'm missing something, the national security letters allow just that. My point stands.

National security letters target individuals and aren't sent in enough volume to cover more than 0.01% of "everyone's emails".

Who are you quoting?

That would be targeted to individual(s) not "all email from everyone" NSLs target a service or an individual or a corporation. Bad as that is, it's not intercepting, storing, scanning every email.

I suppose it's how you choose to interpret other people. They may not read everyone's email, but they certainly can read anyone's. This was always the scary part to me.

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