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Apple Releases Statement on Customer Privacy and Law Enforcement Requests for Customer Data
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Why would you assume that "collaboration" is lawful? Just because 2 parties agree to do something illegal or unconstitutional through "collaboration" doesn't make it legal.
Domestic spying on citizens that are not suspected of wrongdoing is illegal and unconstitutional. If the government suspects illegal activity, they are required to go to a court and have a judge issue a warrant to allow them to search and/or seize evidence. Of course, they have been revealed to NOT be doing that, basically acknowledging that the Constitution has, for all practical purposes, been dismantled and discarded. And most people seem to be okay with that. <sigh>
If I ask Apple nicely for the data and Apple collaborate nicely by handing it over to me, then I haven't done anything wrong, have I?
Btw, when I say "lawfully", it means "in accordance with the law" (be it ever so draconian), in this case the Patriot Act. No-one in the U.S. Government cares about it being unconstitutional, and neither do the majority of Americans.
So you use gpg to encrypt your mail, then only someone who also uses gpg and has already exchanged keys with you can read your mail. That is hardly us full. Even with a key server to aid the exchange.
The thing NSA was reading was NOT the content of the emails. They are reading the headers, the routing information, basically the "to" and "from" lines in an effort to find out who is talking to who. Content encryption does nothing to address that problem.
If you encrypt the addresses on the envelopes then NSA would not be able to snoop. But then the mailman would not know how to deliver the mail either.
There ARE solutions to this problem. It is possible to build a system that encrypts the routing headers. That is what is needed.
I moved your post out of my other thread because as I wrote in the red text of that post, the thread isn't meant to discuss the topic as you have written it. Instead I put your post in the more appropriate thread.
You are correct in that the addresses and subject lines of emails are not encrypted. However, the body of the email will be encrypted and the point of my doing so isn't because I have anything to hide from the government, but I'm doing it as a matter of principle and helping guard my right to privacy.