Any sensitive material that is uploaded should be encrypted anyways.
Self-hosted email is pointless without both parties doing it. Self-hosted would also probably be less secure, less reliable, and have a higher chance of complete failure verses a well established cloud email service.
Using non-US companies is dumb, the whole point of all of this hoopla is that the NSA isn't suppose to be spying on American citizens. The legal mission is gathering foreign intelligence, how is non-US hosted services going to help? The NSA doesn't have a problem with interception and encryption, they practically invented it.
How could anyone possibly believe that the NSA is not gathering a significant amount of data from US companies and US citizens? Their mission is to gather foreign intelligence, to protect the US security systems, and to maintain information dominance. "This Agency also enables Network Warfare operations to defeat terrorists and their organizations at home and abroad, consistent with U.S. laws and the protection of privacy and civil liberties." They ventured into the grey area regarding "privacy and civil liberties", but is the mass interception of data and computer analysis of that data (without it being touched by humans) for strictly national security protection (no political party bullshit) really that bad?
The real issue is that the NSA is not technically allowed to spy on US citizens, which many would argue is 100% required to protect the United States and its allies. More checks and balances need to be in place so that any gathered data is not abused.
Anyone who parades around on the internet spilling their guts over a non-encrypted connection (not that it matters to the NSA), is naive to think that a government doesn't analyze this data. People argue that terrorists could just use "codes" or obscure language so it's pointless to monitor gmail/facebook/everything, but you're battling the NSA, codebreaking is what they live for.
Yes, 1984 is pretty scary, but the issue is so complicated that there is not necessarily a clear right/wrong answer. How do you gather signals intelligence and ensure that horrible terrorist/criminal acts are not committed within this country of 350 million non-trusted citizens?
The public is just now starting to debate (and strongly oppose) the collection of data by the US government, but do you think the govt employees care? Who is going to tell the NSA to stop collecting/analyzing network communications? They would laugh at you and do their best to ensure that leaks do not happen in the future.
Self-hosted email is pointless without both parties doing it. Self-hosted would also probably be less secure, less reliable, and have a higher chance of complete failure verses a well established cloud email service.
Using non-US companies is dumb, the whole point of all of this hoopla is that the NSA isn't suppose to be spying on American citizens. The legal mission is gathering foreign intelligence, how is non-US hosted services going to help? The NSA doesn't have a problem with interception and encryption, they practically invented it.
How could anyone possibly believe that the NSA is not gathering a significant amount of data from US companies and US citizens? Their mission is to gather foreign intelligence, to protect the US security systems, and to maintain information dominance. "This Agency also enables Network Warfare operations to defeat terrorists and their organizations at home and abroad, consistent with U.S. laws and the protection of privacy and civil liberties." They ventured into the grey area regarding "privacy and civil liberties", but is the mass interception of data and computer analysis of that data (without it being touched by humans) for strictly national security protection (no political party bullshit) really that bad?
The real issue is that the NSA is not technically allowed to spy on US citizens, which many would argue is 100% required to protect the United States and its allies. More checks and balances need to be in place so that any gathered data is not abused.
Anyone who parades around on the internet spilling their guts over a non-encrypted connection (not that it matters to the NSA), is naive to think that a government doesn't analyze this data. People argue that terrorists could just use "codes" or obscure language so it's pointless to monitor gmail/facebook/everything, but you're battling the NSA, codebreaking is what they live for.
Yes, 1984 is pretty scary, but the issue is so complicated that there is not necessarily a clear right/wrong answer. How do you gather signals intelligence and ensure that horrible terrorist/criminal acts are not committed within this country of 350 million non-trusted citizens?
The public is just now starting to debate (and strongly oppose) the collection of data by the US government, but do you think the govt employees care? Who is going to tell the NSA to stop collecting/analyzing network communications? They would laugh at you and do their best to ensure that leaks do not happen in the future.