Should I Stop Using a Return Address?
In 1979 the Supreme Court created the "third-party doctrine", that Americans lose their expectation of privacy whenever they voluntarily give information to a third party, such as a phone company. Telling the phone company whom you call by dialing a number is enough to surrender your expectation of privacy that you are contacting that person. The court did, however, preserve the letter analogy governing U.S. mail. That is, only what's on the envelope is fair game.
Which begs the question... if the NSA is hell bent on Meta Data, I wonder if they have an agreement with the Post Office to track who we mail and who mails us? In 1997 the post office began using computers to read addresses. In the beginning, they succeeded about 10% of the time with a 2% error rate. Today over 90% of all mail is processed by computer and for those hard to read addresses, there is a large plain looking warehouse in Salt Lake City filled with rows of cubicles were Postal Service’s data conversion operators decipher the worst hand written addresses.
So basically, every single piece of mail in the US is routed via computer and naturally with the Snowden revelation one should assume the NSA or some other shadow government agency is capturing this data for future use. I don't doubt for a moment that the NSA is properly safeguarding our data. However, it's only a matter of time before another administration, J. Edgar Hoover wannabe or "something" else taps into this data for some future unforeseen nefarious purpose.
Mr. Snowden basically sacrificed his freedom, potentially his life, to tell the people of the world that there really is a Big Brother. Whether his "crime" is comparable to the governments criminality is yet to be seen and regardless of what the talking heads may indicate, his guilt should be determined by a court and not proclaimed by our elected officials. I for one think the recent 205-to-217 Congressional vote to block the National Security Agencies ability to collect vast amounts of phone records was far closer than the White House expected, and leads credibility that Mr. Snowden is a whistle blower.
So if you're thinking it's time to stop putting return addressed on your mail and start using 128 bit encryption for everything Internet based, think again. If something is encrypted the legal assumption can be made, for right or wrong, the information is from a non-US source and thus not subject to constitutional restrictions. The data can now be held indefinitely and oh by the way; the NSA likely has back doors built in to the encryption we use and or CPU's.
Lastly, if the NSA can't crack what you send or your CPU they likely can get into the computer that sent it which reminds... It's time to beef up my computer's passwords, upgrade my firewall, turn off sharing and unplug all computers from the Internet when not in use. Call me silly but those crazy conspiracy nuts aren't looking so nutty lately.
