Well Turbinedrive. I think you touch on an interesting subject area here - M$ looking after the emails.
It does beg questioning why an organisation of the apparent might of BT would 'submit' to a Microsoft solution. I guess it is a financial no-brainier for BT and, let's face it: the old web-mail offering from BT was clunky from the outset; now its not just historical, its hysterical.
Of cause we can be cautioned that now every email sent and received via BT will be 'open-access' for the CIA and Mossad to trawl through with impunity; looking for keywords and profiling the users without reference to any EU/UK legal niceties - (not that I have imagined for a moment it has been significantly different before).
Those Dummkopf who accept as sufficient the Newspeak meme 'if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear' suffer from a radical deficit of practical imagination.
For one there is commercially sensitive information. The CIA is first the sharp-end of a business firm (and secondly a murderous criminal enterprise). If one expects to be able to communicate via email with any higher level of security than if you copied-in Langley whenever one sends - for example - a bank password to your assistant. Or a sell instruction to your stockbroker. Or an offer of cash to your builder. E-mail and postcards have the same level of security clearance. Wake-up folks!
If the UK Inland Revenue commissioned the services of an operation that could detect, with tracking and trawling algorithm software tools, people who exchange emails that reflected large commercial transactions would that be a legitimate tool for fighting large-scale fraud and crime?
Here is the thing about tax. The higher tax is the tougher the enforcement must be. The tougher the enforcement the higher the tax can be. At what level of taxation would one suddenly decide; hang-on this is not legitimate? If tax avoidance was imposable would one really think tax would go down?
How about ones political opinions. Would one be happy for anybody to know which news services one subscribed to? It may well appear silly to think that unless you are looking for instructions of how to act as a wrecker your are going to be of no security interest. Well I sincerely hope that is so. And I sincerely hope that continues to be so for ever and ever.
The rules we make for today have to sustain us in whatever political environment exists tomorrow. If we have a growing political tyranny - say for example the UK handover our 'sovereign autonomy' lock, stock and barrel to the EU (which is endlessly happening, step by step, as we all sleep) and it happens that the majority of the EU nations fancy another session of leather-boot right-wing fascism - what sort of privacy laws do we want in place to fight such oppression. Would we wish for freedom of protest, the right to trial by jury, presumption of innocence. I think so.
I think if we happened to be moving towards a more authoritarian form of society the bast way of providing for that change would be to put the infrastructure of laws unceremoniously into place, Fabian style, that such a society would need BEFORE starting with the nastiness of outright oppression. Once the control mechanisms of tyranny are in place then the only task that remains to instigate the tyranny itself - like a switch.
Any if we want to protect ourselves from the likelihood of that ever being able to occur the simple step is to ensure the control mechanisms, suitable for the sustainment of tyrannical, oppressive authoritarian state, are never allowed to be put into place.
