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back to article Three in ten Americans urge feds to read their email

A survey into attitudes ten years after the 9/11 attacks has found that three out of ten Americans are happy to let the government read their emails without a warrant. And this rose to 47 per cent for emails addressed to foreigners. Over a thousand Americans were polled by NORC at the University of Chicago into their attitudes …

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  1. Tomn8tr

    The future is not so bright

    I live in America and the way we give away our liberties is insane. The Facebookers give no value to privacy and it is a whole generation now. The news here is intended to create fear and make us turn to big government to save us. People blindly let former freedoms be stripped daily and no one seems to notice or care. We have far too many prisons, and they are all full to the gills. One error out of a lifetime, and you can piss off for 10 years, no mulligans or redos here.

    I have only been to the UK once, but the Britts seem to have it better. Their police were nice and polite and not threatening to people. I was at Upper Heyford with the USAF when the base was shutting down. The only negative American sentiment I saw was painting on the bridges the read "We love your faces, but not your bases. Yankee go home!" It''s been a long time, and it's a shame that the Britts probably don't like us Americans much anymore. I still think of us as friends though.

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    1. Figgus
      Reply Icon

      Well

      "I have only been to the UK once, but the Britts seem to have it better. Their police were nice and polite and not threatening to people."

      Britain is not the US, and they have different problems. Nearly 50% of our people get a free ride out of the system, and expect they are owed everything at someone else's expense. That shows in our crime numbers and it also dictates what sort of individuals the police deal with most often.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        @Figgus, RE: Nearly 50% free ride

        I think you need to provide some backing to that statement.

        http://www.thetimes100.co.uk/additional/news--the-impact-changing-demographics-uk-population--55.php

        quick synopsis: approx 67 million population of the UK - 11.3 million pensioners, 35 million non-pensioner tax payers, 11.5 million under 16.

        Which means we have here 57.8 million non-free riders* out of 67 million population = at most 9.2 million free riders which is approximately 14% - and that is the maximum possible.

        Or try:

        http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8124934/Britains-benefits-system-by-numbers.html

        which states "7.2 million: the number of adults and children in Britain living in homes entirely reliant on benefits..." and this is from the Torygraph which is not a friend of benefit recipients.

        So hardly 50% of the population getting a free ride, is it?

        *I don't class pensioners as getting a free ride, even if they are entirely on benefits of one form or another - they have paid their due over the last 50+ years so I am happy to accept that they both deserve this and have already paid for it.

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        1. Figgus
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          @Lee

          Correct. "Here" is in the USA.

          And I agree with you on pensioners, they earned that over their work career as that was the agreement they made at the time they started. A little side track, but an interesting one nonetheless.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A badly informed electorate

    Doesn't surprise me. There's a certain element of the US population who blather on non-stop about "freedom" and "small government" then with their next breath support policies which give the government free reign to invade privacy, dictate moral choices and generally do whatever the hell they want to. It takes a special kind of asleep-at-the-wheel ignorance to hold ideological viewpoints which are so obviously in conflict without questioning any of them.

    What really saddens me though is that last night, our local news ran a segment of a sermon given in DC shortly after 9/11, in which the pastor implored us to avoid being mired in fear or prejudice. So much for that advice.

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  3. Armando 123

    Just FYI

    Many people here are in favor of torture ... to government school administrators and people who drive slow in passing lanes. In fact, St. Francis of Assissi would probably be sympathetic to those sentiments.

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  4. Zippy the Pinhead

    Unless ANY government law enforcement agency (Federal, State, or Local) has a search warrant I don't want them in my email. This goes for Corps as well. They can stay out of my phone conversations and my written stuff as well! lol

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  5. sisk

    Dismay

    My fellow Americans....HAVE YOU LOST YOUR DAMN MINDS?!?!?! What the fuck is wrong with you people?

    I don't want the feds reading my email and I wouldn't trust any intelligence gathered through torture even if I thought it wasn't morally reprehensible.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Excellent point. Torture doesn't even *work*

      If you torture somebody, then eventually they'll either:

      A) Have said nothing whatsoever, and won't now because now they're dead.

      B) Say whatever it is they think you want them to say to just MAKE IT STOP!!! MAKE IT STOP!! MAAKEE IT STOOOOOOOP!!!!

      So you simply cannot discover anything valuable through torture. It's as likely to be made up as not - it's only ever what they think you want to hear.

      - I suppose for the Spanish Inquisition that kind of worked, as they just wanted you to renounce whatever it was they thought you'd said.

      In war, though, it's useless - and this has been known for centuries.

      It's only Hollywood that says different.

      If I was a US soldier, I'd be terrified by the way the US Government allowed those so-called 'enhanced techniques' - because that's a green light to any force that captured *me* to do the same things.

      After all, the US signed up to the Geneva convention so *obviously* anything they do to supposed PoWs is fair game for anyone else to do to US PoWs.

      Finally: Osama Bin Laden was discovered through normal surveillance techniques - following and monitoring the chain of people used to get his tapes out to the world. That's how intelligence actually *works*.

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