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A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law, CNET has learned. [The] rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant.

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986...A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access.

...In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of the United States. The ensuing inspections caused prominent men, like George Washington, to complain of mail tampering. According to various historians, it also led James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to correspond in code. That is, they encrypted their letters to preserve the privacy of their political discussions.

...I've got an e-mail with attachments I spent a long time preparing that explains my story very well I think,I would like you to tell me an e-mail address I can send it to..,I just signed up as an insider,and can't seem to find a simple way to write you with my story..,I'm living/working in Vietnam,and have developed an addiction to heroin,while seeking help to detox,I discovered that the US Gov.

A driver of a white Prius with a giant, red plastic flag affixed to its side is rolling through the hilly streets of San Francisco, undelivering mail from mailboxes. The driver is not a thief. He and the car are part of a startup called Outbox that is attempting to pick up where the embattled United States Postal Service leaves off -- by digitizing physical mail. The driver, dubbed an "unpostman," visits Outbox subscribers' homes three times a week.

By James Bovard -- The U.S. Postal Service announced plans this month to phase out overnight delivery of first-class mail. Postal officials are portraying the decision as a painful but necessary budget-induced departure from a long history of exemplary service. In reality, the Postal Service has been intentionally slowing down first-class mail for almost 50 years. It’s time to end the post office’s monopoly on letter delivery.

The Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself.

The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world.

The law, passed last year as AB 962, would have banned mail order ammunition sales and required all purchases of so called “handgun ammunition” to be registered. In an unwritten ruling from the bench, Judge Jeffrey Hamilton found the law unconstitutionally vague on its face and issued an injunction against its enforcement. For now, at least, mail order ammunition sales to California residents can continue, and ammunition sales need not be registered under the law.

A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate requiring all airports to use full-body scanners lacks sufficient privacy safeguards, says a prominent watchdog group.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center says the bill, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), "contains particularly weak privacy provision[s] that ignore many of the problems with the devices already uncovered."