This trumps all the other privacy arguments. If the government wants to read your email, it need not access it at the endpoints -- it already has access to it in transmission over the compromised backbone. You would need to encrypt your emails to avoid this.

Someone I know once told me crypto is funny because all you have to do is compromise the OS's socket implementation.

Is that before or after you write a gui interface using visual basic to track an IP address? :/

To be fair, this is a guy who does hardened, embedded RTOSes. In the normal world implementation, of course crypto matters.

Sometimes I need to take off my "all software sucks and I hate everything" hat before posting :-/

How so? The application does the encryption, not the OS.

Which is why it baffles me that so few people use S/MIME--other than the trending preference for webmail which isn't well suited for encryption. S/MIME is simple to setup on most email clients, and offers encryption of the body of the mail if the recipient is uses S/MIME as well. There are several of us at work that send encrypted emails all the time.