Graham told a confused Bloomberg News: "I’ve tried not to have a system where I can just say the first dumb thing that comes to my mind. I’ve always been concerned. I can get texts, and I call you back, if I want."

McCain meanwhile said this: "I’m afraid that if I was emailing, given my solid, always calm temperament that I might email something that I might regret. You could send out an email that you would regret later on and would be maybe taken out of context."

via We have no self-control: America's most powerful men explain why they're scared of email • The Register.

This makes perfect sense to me – people are people, not reasoning machines. People make mistakes and they don’t want their mistakes to be replayable through never deletable digital media. The article slams them for this, but basically the writers are saying there should be no expectation of people in power actually being humans. Because people can be called out for any infestimally stupid thing they ever do over email, far after the fact and without any context attached these people have been pushed out of using modern communications because the risks far outweigh the usefulness.

Dutch courts have decided that the ubiquitous tracking of every person in the nation is at variance with the right to having a private life and has to be stopped immediately.

Hopefully the NL Gov (of which the Justice department is very disappointed with the verdict, the house of commons less so) will not appeal this decision but instead make a different law that mandates the collection of this kind of data only after a judge has deemed it necessary on a case by case basis.

ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2015:2498, Rechtbank Den Haag, C/09/480009 / KG ZA 14/1575.