> These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS.
These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast majority of the American's email can be obtained by controlling the servers of a very small number of corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating that when the government comes knocking your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A at Google, Apple, MS, etc.
> They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp.
This is illegal. If it were possible, they wouldn't have bothered with taps.
After the Church Committee, it is very difficult for the government to do illegal things and for it to remain a secret. That's why in all of Snowden's leaks, he revealed only a single extant illegal program, and its legality wasn't so clear that it couldn't be argued in court.
Beyond that, you ignored my previous argument. If they were already doing this, why bother to collect metadata from taps?
Oh this is such absolute misinformation. The reason court cases against the NSA spying (and other related issues) fail is because you need to prove standing which means you need to not only prove you were spied on but that it also 'materially' affected you. And in order to do so you generally need to have reasonable justification to engage in discovery - in order to get the data from the NSA themselves. At that point the NSA simply declares 'nah, national security or something', discovery becomes impossible, you can't prove anything, and the case is dismissed.
These programs all overtly violate, amongst other things, the 4th amendment, but the structure of our legal system makes it effectively impossible to legally challenge them.
> The reason court cases against the NSA spying (and other related issues) fail is because you need to prove standing. These programs all overtly violate, amongst other things, the 4th amendment.
This is pure ignorance. If it actually sucked up everybody's data, everybody would have standing. Snowden's leaks showed that they don't, that only the phone metadata program did.
These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast majority of the American's email can be obtained by controlling the servers of a very small number of corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating that when the government comes knocking your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A at Google, Apple, MS, etc.