I'm Afraid People will Spy on my E-mail

The only person that will ever read an e-mail you send out is the person you sent that e-mail to. Neither the government, nor anyone else, has spies out there reading peoples' e-mails. Such an endeavor would be both technologically and economically unfeasible. There are several reasons why.

For one, there is no "central point" through which all e-mail messages go where they could be "grabbed" and read. That's because there is no central place called the Internet. The Internet consists of millions of computers spread throughout the world.

Even if it were possible to funnel all the e-mail messages in the world to one place, there isn't a computer large enough to store the millions of messages that cross the lines every minute. Such a computer would need to be as large as a skyscraper. But the computer costs pale in comparison to the human costs.

If you wanted to give each "spy" one minute to read each e-mail, you'd need millions of spies to keep up with the traffic. I figure you'd need about five square miles of office space to house that many people. Their salaries would add up to about $10,000 per year per American taxpayer. Not something you could easily hide. And not many Americans are gonna go for having $10,000 added to their tax bill every year just to have a bunch of people sitting around reading goofy e-mails all day.

Finally, even if all the above did happen, the bad guys would just use code words in their e-mails to disguise the true meaning of their messages. So in the long run, it would be an enormous waste of time and resources. It just doesn't make sense, economically.

Here's another thought. If you're afraid someone is going to spy on your e-mail, you should stop using the telephone as well. And the mail. And talking above a whisper to anybody at all. Because it's easier to tap into phones, paper mail, and spoken conversations than it would be to tap into someone's e-mail. It's just not something worth worrying about, any way you slice it.