True true. The mass of email transactions are unencrypted. However I suspect the ones that, from an international or industrial espionage point of view, you'd actually be interested in are the ones that are most likely to be scrambled..

NSA's XKeyscore tool sees 'nearly everything' you do on the internet Is the NSA using XKeyscore to unlock your secret web life?
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New documents provided by Prism whistle-blowing fugitive Edward Snowden detail another of the NSA's tools to keep tabs on what people do online.

The database program is called XKeyscore, and is said to be the agency's "widest reaching" system.

Leaked top secret documents claim that it tracks and allows agents to search through the emails, online chats, website visits, searches conducted and all the associated metadata (the whens and hows) of millions of internet users.

The training presentation seen by the Guardian explains that this allows for "real time" interception of a person's web activity - and to target a single person, all the NSA needs is a phone number or email address.
Target practice

Once it has that, it can search through related content by name, phone number, IP address, keywords, language or browser. This added flexibility is needed because "[searching by email address alone] gives us only a very limited capability" . Poor lambs, why's that? Because "a large amount of time spent on the web is performing actions that are anonymous".

The email addresses and phone numbers used and searched for by XKeyscore can be skimmed from people's address books or received emails' signatures, not necessarily just those of the people the NSA is actively monitoring.

What's more, XKeyscore doesn't just track the fact that emails have been sent and received - it also allows agents to search and read email body text and the to, from, CC and BCC lines.

If the average person calls 40 unique people, such three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23522565

All I can think of now is Person of Interest - how much 'ordinary crime' data is being ignored I wonder? Not that that would ever justify what they're doing here.

Congress eyes renewed push for legislation to rein in the NSA

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/a ... rveillance

Some of the world's leading telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, are secretly collaborating with Britain's spy agency GCHQ, and are passing on details of their customers' phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show.

BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together with four other smaller providers – have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. The cables carry much of the world's phone calls and internet traffic.

In June the Guardian revealed details of GCHQ's ambitious data-hoovering programmes, Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. It emerged GCHQ was able to tap into fibre-optic cables and store huge volumes of data for up to 30 days. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for 20 months.

On Friday Germany's Süddeutsche newspaper published the most highly sensitive aspect of this operation – the names of the commercial companies working secretly with GCHQ, and giving the agency access to their customers' private communications. The paper said it had seen a copy of an internal GCHQ powerpoint presentation from 2009 discussing Tempora.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/04/nsa-us-embassy-closures-terrorist-threat
That's just embarrassing. How gullible do they think people are?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/04/nsa-us-embassy-closures-terrorist-threat

That's just embarrassing. How gullible do they think people are?