Who else reads your e-mail?

We use e-mail for everything from business negotiations to quick I-love-yous. Because e-mail resembles a telephone conversation, we too often assume it's private. It's not. Just ask Sarah Palin. A college student recently broke into her Yahoo e-mail account with frightening ease; he boasted that it took just 45 minutes using Wikipedia and Google to find the answers to Yahoo's security questions about her birth date, ZIP Code, and where she met her husband. But break-ins are hardly the only threat to our e-mail privacy. Who can see your e-mail - even en route - is a complicated question, made more uncertain by a recent court decision. First, your office e-mail is governed by whatever rules your company decides. If the government wants to see your e-mail, it can have the warrant served on that company. Of course, the service provider has to respond to the warrant, just as you would if the feds came to your house. The difference is that the company decides whether to resist the court order, not you. You are supposed to be informed within 90 days, but in practice you may never know. E-mail stored elsewhere really isn't yours.