I deliberately waited before writing about the atrocious, god-awful "Councilman" decision, in which a U.S. Appeals Court panel ruled, 2-1, that your e-mail isn't private when it's in transit, on someone else's server.

To arrive at this decision, executive director Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote, the court basically had to twist the 1986 Wiretap Act into a pretzel. It's one more example of how important judges are in the American judicial system. (That's Rotenberg, left, as he appeared on the PBS NewsHour in 2000.)

In applying this decision, moreover, federal law enforcement may get everything they wanted from Congress, carte blanche to examine anyone's e-mail, and the time to decrypt it if necessary. Since voice packets too may stop at servers while in transit, again giving law enforcement the authority it sought.

However, the legal hurdles to packet inspection are just the tip of a very large iceberg. China has sought to filter nearly all forms of Internet communication for years, yet on many levels their society continues to open up, because there are just too many ways to hide disloyal thoughts, not just in encryption, but in statements which, on their face, appear totally loyal. Or, as your local Mafia don might say, "badda-boom, badda-bing."

In the end no government -- not theirs, not ours -- can turn around the Internet's movement toward freedom. There are just too many packets, going in too many directions, for any law enforcement effort to catch them all. The only hope lies in narrowing the targets, going only after the clearest suspects and the most heinous crimes.

Once law enforcement learns this -- and no country's law enforcement has yet learned this -- then we'll really see a new birth of freedom. Until then, both sides in this debate between rights and responsibility will remain frustrated.