is telephone call communication.
Let's face it, even with Hushmail or its ilk, any email you send outside their system is unencrypted for half the trip, so chances are most of your email is snoopable -- and most people should know that and act accordingly.
But most people haven't caught on to the implications of the recent Bushite initiative the Congress rubber-stamped. This allows federal bureaucrats to snoop anywhere, any time, even just throw a dragnet out across all phone traffic between points in the US and overseas.
"So what?" say the naive, "I never call overseas." Wrong! Practically all order fulfillment call centers are now located overseas, which means every time you recite your credit card number, expiration date, verification # and name of cardholder to that order taker, that private financial information is potentially passing through the federal snoops' dragnet.
Now imagine you're a low-level security IT clerk working this thing. You're doing OK with your cushy federal job and all its perks, but know you're never going to get rich either. Then it dawns on you that there's a huge, lucrative marketplace for all this data that's passing across your screen every day.
Cobble together some voice recognition software with a filter that looks for the number pattern characteristic of credit cards. Slip it into the computer that's watching for words like "Al Qaeda", sit back for a while, and then harvest the results to a USB stick you can take home at night. Get into the on-line underworld community, peddle your data to them, collect your "private retirement bonus", quit your federal job, and go live out your life on a beach in South America.
It isn't a matter of If, it's a matter of When. Unless Congress gets some backbone and cleans up this mess, which doesn't appear likely.
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