Right, so let's agree to a system when the government will open every letter, scan the contents, save them to a database, but not read them until after they've

Right, so let's agree to a system when the government will open every letter, scan the contents, save them to a database, but not read them until after they've run some analysis and determined that your specific letter is of interest. That is precisely what they're doing here, except on a much larger scale than the post office could ever fathom. It is shocking to compare this to the past. I've just finished reading "Team of Rivals", a biography of Lincoln, and the amount of deeply sensitive stuff that these high-level politicians shared in personal letters to their loved ones and colleagues is astonishing. No politician today would ever put such stuff in writing - if it got into the wrong hands, it could cause incalculable damage to their reputations, relationships, etc. Those guys were being entirely honest in hand-written letters that were delivered days away in different states by a very rudimentary postal system. They clearly had complete trust in the sanctity of the privacy of their letters. This level of trust in the US government (or any, in fact) is pretty much unthinkable today. We (the people) have lost a lot of valuable ground here.