Recently in this column I mentioned the Electronic Frontier Organization and their web site found at prism-break.org where internet users concerned about their privacy may learn more about secure software and encryption. I warned that there are no simple solutions, so if an easy answer is what you are looking for you may as well stop reading now.
Preventing governments or anyone else reading your email requires secure encryption and there is an absolutely unbreakable one available for free. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a lot more than pretty good; it is completely uncrackable; so much so that when Phil Zimmermann wrote it 20 years ago the U.S. government tried to suppress it by charging him with the crime of creating and exporting a dangerous weapon without a license. (I am NOT making this stuff up!). Zimmermann made the source code for PGP public and when Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press published it in book form it was protected by the First Amendment. Several years later a frustrated U.S. government dropped its criminal pursuit of Zimmermann.