SOMEONE NEEDS TO WRITE A LONG ARTICLE

There are too many things I don't know about how the Internet works for me to make an informed decision about what the NSA is up to.  Here's just one of those things:

How Web mail providers leave door open for NSA surveillance

by Declan McCullagh
June 21, 2013 5:30 AM PDT
CNET

Over the last decade or so, Web mail providers began to turn on encryption to armor the connections between users' computers and Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and other services. That form of protection against surveillance, which typically appears in a Web browser as an "https" connection accompanied by a padlock image, is viewed as generally secure and is used by banks as well. Google has offered it since 2004, and Yahoo finally followed suit this year.

 But during the next step, when those e-mail messages are transferred from one company's servers to another's, they're rarely encrypted. An e-mail message that a Facebook user addresses to a Yahoo Mail user, for instance, will be delivered in an unencrypted form through a server-to-server connection that provides no protection against surveillance.