Secure email involves electronic privacy, guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. However, after a hundred and eighty days e-mail messages lose their status as protected communications and become just another database record, meaning that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that’s needed for service providers to reveal them. (E-mail privacy will be revisited at the conclusion of this article.)
In order to secure email communications, all routers along the pathway must be protected, including the connections between them. This means encryption of the highest order. Unfortunately, while such technology is readily available, it has not achieved widespread adoption, probably due to the negative social perception of its use as paranoia.
Two techniques exist to provide for secure email connections.
Both approaches have pros and cons, and have their proponents in the industry. Unfortunately again, industry-wide adoption toward regular encryption of data continues to proceed slowly. It is quite a chicken-or-egg situation, with users reluctant to adopt what are perceived to be esoteric technical processes and industry unable to agree on standards anyway!
In general, e-mail is a completely insecure method of communications. This comes as a shock to the vast majority of users, so common has e-mailing become in the past two decades, but the truth is that even in the 21st Century eavesdropping, message modification, false messages, and other issues still exist. And unlike the case of something such as a computer break-in, e-mail security problems are very difficult to detect in the first place, never mind remedy!
Moreover, according to a federal court in Pennsylvania, corporate e-mail accounts have no reasonable expectation of privacy. In an especially chilling case, Smyth vs. Pillsbury (that’s right, the company), it was ruled that despite the company’s own policy explicitly stating that no employee shall be fired over e-mail usage, which is to be confidential, Pillsbury did just that, in determining an employee’s response to his supervisor’s e-mail worthy of termination!