Lavabit founder: 'If You Knew What I Know About Email, You Might Not Use It'

[bhikkhu]

116. We trust different people for different reasons

...google, more or less, and other corporations, because the motive of themselves and their employees is well known - simply to make a profit. They are pretty predictable and work within a set of rules. Any individual within a corporation could misuse the data, but that would be prosecutable, and it is in the interests of the organization to maintain trust with their customers.

Then the government, which does just have, but is the source of our official identification data. They have a large variety of private data on myself and my family, by their nature. Of course they have all sorts of things that could be misused, but any government employee works under a set of rules and controls to eliminate misuse by individuals within the government, and consequences are well defined if that were to happen.

How many people in the IRS could have leaked Romney's tax information, for instance, or any other candidate's, yet that didn't happen?

If I trust the government to educate my children, to manage my retirement, to process my taxes and so forth, I also trust them enough that I don't care if they have "the capability" to read my emails. I can't imagine any reason they would want to, but the capability is simply a product of technology.