From Mariah Blake, Gavin Aronsen, and Dana Liebelson for Mother Jones, “There Is No Such Thing As NSA-Proof Email”:

Levison, who is reportedly under federal gag order, declined to elaborate (though he opined, based on his experience, that we’re a “whisper’s breath away” from becoming a society where all electronic communications are recorded and scrutinized by the government). But according to other industry insiders and cybersecurity experts, there’s good reason to be wary of transmitting sensitive information via email–even if your provider claims to have iron-clad safeguards.

Tech giants, such as the Microsoft subsidiary Hotmail, regularly hand over data to the government. In fact, in the last eight months of 2012 (the most recent period for which data is available), Hotmail, Google, Facebook, and Twitter provided law enforcement authorities with information on more than 64,000 users. And that doesn’t include responses to secret national security letters ordered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, or FISA.

This ties in a bit with ‘where nothing to hide fails as logic’ – the main argument there is mostly about what the individual can do to protect themselves. ‘Nothing to hide’ basically argues that because the individual being surveilled isn’t doing anything wrong, it doesn’t matter.

Similarly, we’ve seen a lot of stories pop up about how to protect yourself online – from https, to encryption, to email services like the recently-shuttered Lavabit, mentioned above, where the company hosting your email is incapable of actually seeing it because only you have the decryption key. This will protect your email from being scooped up and read as part of an NSA dragnet, it does not mean the NSA will not try and figure out a way to get in and get access.

This is why the battle for privacy has to be fought on the government/policy level. We’ve hit the point where there’s simply nothing an individual can do the fully protect themselves, and the only way we can protect ourselves from being spied on is to, at a minimum, have some legit level of oversight or at most, shut the whole thing down.