zlacker

> And before email we had mail, handled directly by the government, although reading mail is more difficult without leaving traces.

This is the source of some massive disconnects between people and their governments, I think. They had some permission, which we basically agreed on as a society, when their tampering was obvious and/or limited in scale (just due to practical constraints). We gave our consent to be governed with those constraints in mind.

Nowadays they are continuing without those implicit constraints and they don’t want to have the conversation about implementing new explicit constraints. This isn’t the deal we agreed to, really, it is just what they can get away with without permission. You can rule over a populace without their permission, of course—it’s just very different from the sort of pleasant (albeit never perfect) relationship that willing populations and their elected officials have had recently.

>>bee_ri+(OP)
Good point about those constraints. It's bad when governments have a superhighway of information with an email provider. If they have to go through a painful process for each email, it would be like the paper envelope. But if they have an arrangement with the email provider where they can access whatever they want, that would be a terrible downgrade for the people compared to the paper mail days indeed. We have proof that such mass data collection happened in some countries.