Does the government have the right to monitor private emails?

A defining element of the kinds of abusive, totalitarian regimes seen in our lifetimes has been all-pervasive surveillance – be it in East Germany, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, or Qadafi’s Libya – including the routine steaming open of people’s letters, tapping phone calls, or sifting through their emails.

But Western governments have passed law after law, ranging from the UK’s new bid to monitor all our online usage, to the US Patriot Act, the US’s impending Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, and the EU’s Data Retention Directive, all supposedly protecting us from terrorism and crime in the age of global communications, but really demolishing our rights to privacy and to live free of this blanket, state-directed paranoia in which people’s lives are shut down on suspicion alone. These are freedoms that previous generations paid mightily to protect, but which governments are now casually destroying.