Wifi and Patriots

1. If your mother uses wifi at home to send you e-mail, and your home network is not protected by WEP or WPA, what reasons would you suggest to her for enabling one of these two protocols at home if the liability of reading those e-mails still exists once her message leaves your home, on it’s way to school?

Without protection it can be quite simple for someone jump onto your network and access your personal information, like your e-mails. The main reason that I would give to my mother is that records from TJX stated that even by using WEP protection, more than 45 million credit card and debit card records were stolen from them. That being said, I would tell my mother to at the very least get WPA protection. The last thing that I would want is for someone to access all of my mother's or my own personal data just because she doesn't have proper protection.

2. Some news reports have suggested that the Bush administration used the USA Patriot Act to look at the e-mails of American citizens without a warrant. What’s your position if this was indeed the case? Should citizens be willing to give up their privacy? Does it bother you to know that your online communications are very potentially semi-private instead of private?

I personally think that the Patriot Act was not a wise choice on behalf of our government. While I do believe that our safety is extremely important, I also believe that our freedom is. When you no longer can send an e-mail without the threat of the government reading it and deciding if it is OK, a question needs to be raised as to how free are we really? I see this going in a bad direction in the future. While it may seem like it is a good idea now to give our government the ability to invade our privacy because it is for our safety, I could see them being able to justify themselves and use these policies when it is not desperately needed in the future. I believe that privacy should be maintained to the fullest degree possible.