Blayne Sucks

Earlier this week the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals made an important ruling about the privacy of emails. This ruling basically states that a probable cause warrant would have to be issued for investigators to get access to your emails from an ISP. While you might have thought that something like this would already have been standard practice, the reality is that previous to this ruling investigators could have readily gained access to your emails from your ISP and you likely wouldn’t have known.

Another important thing to take from this is that anyone using an encryption protocol for their email would have been unaffected by a secret investigation. Investigators would certainly have been able to gain access to your emails, but they would have had no way to read them. I understand a lot of the arguments against using email encryption. It isn’t user friendly in most cases and there’s a lot of annoying overhead in setting it up right. However, in a world where almost every kind of communication from love letters to business deals are talked about in emails, which are stored on thousands of different servers for much, much longer than people realize, there’s certainly a compelling argument to biting the bullet and dealing with the overhead.

If you are using a webmail account, this could be more difficult. However, as I posted previously, there are some promising signs that email encryption can be done entirely through a web browser.