A friend of mine alerted me to some horrible legislation working its way through numerous statehouses:
The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that “conceal from a communication service provider … the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication”. Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal — with no exceptions.
If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you’re in violation, because the “To” and “From” lines of the emails are concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)
Go read the whole thing, and check to see if your state has any legislation pending. Make sure you read the comments to the site I linked.
MommaBear
Even without reading the full [linked] post, that is just TOO SCARY and evil. Thanks for the heads-up!