Thank you very much for justifying my overly complicated email hierarchy. I maintain one .mac, two gmail, and five OEM IMAP accounts, as well as keeping a Yahoo and an AOL in reserve for assorted bullshit clients. Much of the serious stuff is stored on my OEMs, despite lacking a bottomless g-drive-like backup for every little thing I ever sent. Could my shit be snooped? Certainly. But it takes a bit more effort, which is enough for me.
I thought the whole point of the revelations about Five Eyes snooping was that it didn't matter how you ran your backend, since they simply archived everything that passed across the wire. We have already been snooped. Data are simply sitting in storage waiting for the right selectors to be run on them if we become of interest.
Oh, no doubt. The question is whether it's in a a nice, big, indexed database named "Google" or whether it's in /Hostgator/squirellydomain/squirrellysubdomain/ThisIdiot'sImap/FoldersWithWeirdNames/LastOctober.bin. If you're on Google or MSN or any of the big services, they plug right in - they want things to be searchable after all. If you're rolling your own, it's my arbitrary bullshit in my arbitrary corner of the web. Yeah, they can get there no problem. It's more of a pain in the ass, though. "More of a pain in the ass" is enough for me for now. I know I can't keep 'em out. I don't mind making 'em work for it.
Well that's the idea isn't it? Even if we're compromised, at least it will still be a pain in the ass. A digital representation of resolve.