Who wants to know what you're saying? It might be a nosey coworker, your employer, your ISP, a competitor, spouse, or legal team. Regardless of who wants to, it is remarkably easy for someone else to read what you write.

WASHINGTON (AP) 9/20/99-- The Clinton administration reportedly plans to ask Congress to give police authority to secretly go into people's personal computers and crack their security codes. Legislation drafted by the Justice Department would let investigators get a sealed warrant from a judge to enter private property, search through computers for passwords and override encryption programs, The Washington Post reported Friday. Under the measure, investigators would obtain sealed search warrants signed by a judge as a prelude to getting further court permission to wiretap, extract information from computers or conduct further searches. Privacy advocates have objected to the plan, dubbed the Cyberspace Electronic Security Act by the Justice Department. Peter Swire, the White House's chief counselor for privacy, told the newspaper the administration supports encryption as a way to provide privacy for computer users. The administration has for years been seeking a law to require computer makers to include a so-called Clipper Chip in their products that would give police a "back door" into computers despite any encryption software they may contain.

By David Phinney ABC NEWS While many people think of e-mail as a convenient alternative to a telephone conversation "and just as private" there is a big difference. E-mail is as public as a postcard and leaves a written record long after it has been erased. Any skilled person can recover the email message's ghost somewhere deep in the bowels of a networked system. And so far, businesses seem to have the perfect right to do so, according to law and recent court rulings. Pushing the delete button doesn't do much, because we usually find a copy somewhere else on the system says John Jessen, head of Electronic Evidence Discovery, Inc., a Seattle company engaged in helping companies locating and reviewing electronic data during court disputes. Computer files are becoming a primary source of data and that's where the evidence is coming from. And there are more elaborate means to invade your privacy.

Eavesdropping on Europe by Niall McKay Europe's governing body has commissioned a full report into the workings of Echelon, a global network of highly sensitive listening posts operated in part by America's most clandestine intelligence organization, the National Security Agency. "Frankly, the only people who have any doubt about the existence of Echelon are in the United States," said Glyn Ford, a British member of the European Parliament and a director of Scientific and Technical Options Assessment, or STOA, a technology advisory committee to the parliament. Echelon is reportedly able to intercept, record, and translate any electronic communication -- telephone, data, cellular, fax, email, telex -- sent anywhere in the world.

CAREFUL, THEY MIGHT HEAR YOU By DUNCAN CAMPBELL 05/23/99 Australia has become the first country openly to admit that it takes part in a global electronic surveillance system that intercepts the private and commercial international communications of citizens and companies from its own and other countries. The disclosure was made May 23rd by Martin Brady, director of the Defence Signals Directorate in Canberra. Mr. Brady's decision to break ranks and officially admit the existence of a hitherto unacknowledged spying organisation called UKUSA is likely to irritate his British and American counterparts, who have spent the past 50 years trying to prevent their own citizens from learning anything about them or their business of "signals intelligence" - "sigint" for short. Together with the giant American National Security Agency (NSA) and its Canadian, British, and New Zealand counterparts, DSD operates a network of giant, highly automated tracking stations that illicitly pick up commercial satellite communications and examine every fax, telex, e-mail, phone call, or computer data message that the satellites carry. Now, due to a fast-growing UKUSA system called Echelon, millions of messages are automatically intercepted every hour, and checked according to criteria supplied by intelligence agencies and governments in all five UKUSA countries. Until this year, the US Government has tried to ignore the row over Echelon by refusing to admit its existence. Information is also fed into the Echelon system from taps on the Internet, and by means of monitoring pods which are placed on undersea cables. "Now that the Cold War is over, the focus is towards economic intelligence. Never ever over-exaggerate the power that these organisations have to abuse a system such as Echelon. Don't think it can't happen. It does."

The NSA The National Security Agency is actively "sniffing" key Internet sites that route electronic mail traffic, according to author Wayne Madsen. In an article in the Computer Fraud and Security Bulletin, Madsen reported that sources within the government and private industry have told him that the NSA is monitoring two key Internet routers which direct electronic mail traffic in Maryland and California. In an interview, Madsen said he was told that the NSA is "sniffing" for the address of origin and the address of destination" of electronic mail. The NSA is also allegedly monitoring traffic passing through large Internet gateways by scanning network access points operated by regional and long-distance service providers. Madsen writes that the network access points allegedly under surveillance are at gateway sites in Pennsauken, N.J. (operated by Sprint), Chicago (operated by Ameritech and Bell Communications Research) and San Francisco (operated by Pacific Bell).