Your e mail was great!

A friend of mine who works in ID security recently expressed alarm that the US govt is interceting suspicious e-mail messages. He noted that this not only is a privacy concern but it could compromise confidential personal and credit or financial information. So the new story about domestic e-mail surveillance today adds emphasis to that problem. From the NY Times (also see direct link to story in the headline of this blog posting):

"The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said."

The New York Times continued by describing the surveillance program (intended to identify potential threats to the United States and terrorist plots that might be brewing out there in Cyber space. The Congressional concern is a report coming from,

" ... the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation."

So we are still holding our breath that these programs make us safer without violating our privacy and civil liberties.

sws