Elliot thinks it's not... and I disagree.  He makes a lot of good points regarding this article, but he makes one major mistake.  He confuses the ability to do something with the authority to do it.  Is email communication secure?  As Elliot points out... unless you use a product like PGP, then the answer is most definitely no.

But just because something isn't encrypted doesn't give the government free reign to demand access to that communication without a warrant.  After all, telephone communications aren't encrypted either.  Anyone with a handset and a couple alligator clips can sit on a telephone pole and listen to your phone calls, but it is well established case law that the government requires a warrant to tap your phone.  If you choose to leave your door unlocked, the police still need a warrant to enter your home and search it.

More importantly, for the majority of time that an email is "exposed", it is on a server, not in transit between locations.  That means that in order to gain access to my email, the government has to go to an ISP, who is acting as a caretaker of my information.  Do I have an expectation of privacy while my email is sitting on a server, when I require a password to gain access to that data?  I believe the average person would say yes, and that this is a reasonable belief.  Even though many Terms of Service Agreements say that the ISP will comply with all lawful requests by the government, most people read that to mean that the ISP will comply with legal warrants.  Sadly, it has turned out that this is not the case, and that many ISP's not only comply with mere "requests" for data, there are some aspects of telecommunications laws that require ISP's to comply with warrantless requests for data.  And even if those laws didn't exist, the mere request for data by the government could often times be construed to have the potential for retribution if that request is refused.

With that said, the only way to guarantee that the government isn't snooping on your data is to use secure encryption technology like PGP.  It used to be that we only had to lock our doors to protect ourselves from criminals.  Now we have to lock our doors to protect ourselves from the government.  I guess that simply illustrates the point that the government really is criminal.