In what the Los Angeles Times terms “the latest illustration of the Bush administration’s disregard for your privacy”, the Justice Department is trying to win court permission to read millions of people’s e-mail without obtaining a warrant. Currently, your e-mail is protected — unless it’s been sitting on a server for more than 180 days. That’s bad enough, in a time when so many people leave copies of their e-mails sitting in their Hotmail accounts indefinitely. But now the feds want to extend their snooping rights to be able to read any e-mail that the recipient has already opened.