i know what you … wrote last summer

In the year 2010, German secret services read 37.292.862 private emails, five times as many as in 2009. The numbers for 2011 are yet unknown. In these 37.292.862 emails, 213 emails were found which were of interest.

When a state interferes with your privacy, it should always a question of commensurability: does the method in question improve security in such a drastic way that it is reasonable to bend a few citizens’ right for privacy?

In this case, the state read ~17.500 emails to find 1 email with content of interest. In other words, in 17.500 instances privacy was undermined (read: violated) to find one person who might or might not have planned a criminal act.

I’m not happy about that, because it implies that many people were accused to be criminals, and their right for privacy was ignored for that reason, in order to find one.
It is not in proportion.