Tinfoil hat time: The government’s lack of proactivity regarding laws that address the current and future concerns of digital life does not strike me as coincidental. I think that there is, at least on some level, and intentionality to the logic that permits law enforcement LPR systems to scan and keep location data on thousands of license plates that are not implicated or involved in crimes. The foundational documents of this country were written by people who could never have imagined email, or data centers, or Wikileaks.

While technology has advanced beyond what anybody could have imagined in even the 1980s, when most households didn’t own a computer, it seems especially troubling that the government has used these advancements to exponentially expand their abilities to monitor the populace, and has not acted like an institution that is supposed to exist within a framework of checks and balances. The combination of secrecy and incompetence exhibited by the government when trying to get information from Lavabit is especially troubling, and I can’t decide whether it’s a good or bad thing that they’re so bad at this stuff.

Other thoughts: I have a lot of different email addresses, all free. With the professional and academic addresses, I have no expectation of privacy and conduct myself accordingly. WIth the other address, most of which are through Google, I’ve been pretty lax about considering how my data is used. I have browser add-ons that disable ads, so I don’t even remember that I should be seeing targeted ads. The adage that Lavabit founder Ladar Levison cites (“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”) is one that makes complete sense, but is hard to keep at the forefront of my mind when compared to the ease of using Gmail/Google mail for business. Related: Yahoo has to pay $50b due to breaching mail users’ data

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