Be Careful When Emailing That Illegal Stuff

A court has ruled that the government can legally obtain the IPs of your internet traffic, and the header information from emails without a warrant. So when Uncle Sam wants to see what you're up to, they don't need permission to do it...sorta. The exact details of the ruling were not explained, but that's not really the part I care about. I got to talking to a friend about this, and was saying that obtaining the to/from addresses on an email is not all that different from obtaining the to/from addresses on a letter. While there is no examining of the content of the letter, one only has to look at the envelope in order to see this information. What is important is that the court's ruling means that there is not a reasonable expectation of privacy on these email addresses. To me, this seems like (here's where I point out that I have no legal knowledge on this at all) one would not have a reasonable expectation of privacy from the government when sending a letter via USPS either. Arter all, every piece of mail already is getting scanned for routing purposes, so technically speaking government computers are already looking at to/from addresses of your mail. The difference, of course, is the use of that information. Also, currently, unless there's something I don't know, the government doesn't actually have any way of recording this info. Back to the point, though, I wouldn't think that to assume that email wouldn't be protected is that far of a stretch, since I'm assuming snail mail isn't, given the reason I just said (again, if this is just flat out wrong, point it out please).