Who is going to protect our privacy from the guys with search warrants?
Meanwhile, we keep them so busy trying to get revenge on us that they have no energy left to bother you. What about spam (unsolicited e-mail)? Yes, it’s a pain to have to delete all those unwanted emails. It could be much worse, however. Greedy advertisers first discovered the potential of e-mail in 1995. E-mail is much cheaper than regular mail. As a result, soon spammers discovered dirty tricks to harvest or guess the addresses of tens of millions of people, and ways to pump out junk mail even cheaper by taking over other peoples’ e-mail servers. (An e-mail server gathers e-mail produced on peoples’ desktop computers and sends them to their destinations.) By 1996 the volume of junk mail was threatening to bog down the entire Internet. Because junk e-mail is almost free to send, it looked like we would soon reach the day when the average person would have to sift through thousands of e-mails each day just to find legitimate messages. Politicians struggled to think up ways to outlaw sp
