If you render it into a digital format, it’s public domain.
When the only thing protecting you is government policy, you have no protection at all. The mere existence of any entity’s access means it will be used and abused. It’s not so much that government employees are immoral, but that their individual moral barriers are always low in areas where the system demands they be. A government employee possessed of high moral standards against government intrusion will be out of a job sooner or later.
Technology? The Internet has virtually no inherent ability to maintain your privacy. It was not designed for secrecy, either. The problem is that the information is accessible even after it has been encrypted. The existence of a networking link to any machine containing data is an invitation to snoop. Transmitting it might as well be broadcasting.
If you use encryption and password locking, you have some slim hope of keeping it private/secret. The trick after that is keeping things off the radar. If someone wants it bad enough, they are likely to eventually crack it. What protects most of us is the vast volume of data, and that most of it is of no interest to those who can crack it.
In quantum moral terms, you should never pretend that you have any real control over anything digitized. Government snooping is something you should take for granted. Private snooping is but a different flavor of the same thing. Encryption merely raises the price tag on access; complete denial simply does not exist. This is the primary flaw in government access control policies: They seldom formulate plans for the inevitable disclosure. Don’t make that mistake. Assume eventual disclosure of everything.
All this huff and puff about invasion of privacy/secrecy is egregiously dishonest, no more than the silliest acts of kids who say, “Let’s pretend.” Stop pretending.
It’s the same with any calculus for connecting to the Internet in the first place. You’d be a fool to count on your Windows OS and protective software to protect your privacy. Most of the threats you face are those randomly aimed at known vulnerabilities in the system almost everybody else is using. There are numerous prosperous companies and individuals doing nothing more than discovering and selling information about Windows vulnerabilities that remain unknown to Microsoft and unpatched. There is some reason to believe Microsoft leaves some of those doors open intentionally. MS owns the OS; you are just renting a copy. They retain the power and legal right to disable it any time they choose for no reason at all.
On top of the inherent insecurity of Windows, even the options to harden the system are well-hidden and never turned on by default. It requires a highly specialized knowledge to engage even the simplest low levels of genuine system security on Windows.
Other operating systems will make your computer a harder target. Not only are they inherently more difficult to crack, but the extra measures of security are often presented in-your-face in the process of installing it. But because humans are writing the software, security will always be relative. Other OSes have their own on-going discovery of security holes. For the most part, Open Source software tends to be fixed more quickly because the entire process is so very public. Shame is a powerful motivator.
You’ll need to balance between the collection of reasons and needs for which you use a computer versus the risk of cracking and intrusion by governments and private enterprise, along with criminal interests. Snooping will happen because the Internet is simply not designed for privacy. Get over it.
You want privacy? Reconstruct the tribal social structure where your whole clan can deny physical access to the enclave, and make your communications face-to-face. Otherwise, privacy is just a fable — all the more so on the Internet.
