We will do it because we can!

If in the 1960s a government had proposed that every person who wrote a letter had to, before posting it, file details of their name and address and provide details of the person to whom they sent the letters, and deposit a photostatic copy of the letter, which the government would not open without permission from a judge, the hippies and the establishment would have united to prevent such a plan. It would not matter how much the Home Secretary protested that the plan was to prevent the IRA blowing us all up and prevent organised criminals like the Krays from operating it would not have been enacted.

The hippies would have sung from the same hymn sheet as the establishment. The older generation would have explained that this was not what they and their colleagues fought for and died for in the Second World War.

Yet this is in essence the proposal that the government is now flying when it comes to emails. They can legislate for email operators to hold emails on servers for specific periods of time, they can enact laws that require them to attach hardware to servers to enable them to spy on our email communications and what they can do is a whole lot easier tahn what they could ever have done with the postal system in days of old.

We should not trust governments; they forget that they are our servants and not our masters. If we are unable to treat our email communications as private then we lose our freedom, our precious freedom which once lost will take generations to regain.