I think the encryption 786 is talking about is the only real option. I don't trust any service to faithfully encrypt anything, especially if its a free service. There are only a few companies that provide the "backbone" of the internet, and if I was a Government intelligence agency, they would be the first places I would show up, with lots of paperwork and trucks full of scary looking guys with badges and ID cards. Wouldn't you? If your job was to say, protect everyone in an apartment complex, and in order to do that you needed to know as much as possible about what was going on, wouldn't you need to open everyone's mail? And if you could do it without them knowing, by providing the actual mail delivery service?
I never felt like the internet was "free" or that I somehow deserved privacy on it. Someone, somewhere, OWNS the internet, or at least the chips and wires it runs on, and that's as good as owning it.
TOR was supposed to be encrypted, and untraceable. But then it turned out if you had a big enough "view" of traffic, you could discover the origin of a user.
I think a lot slips through the cracks, and I think "they" let some things go to keep people in the dark about how much internet traffic they can actually monitor, but I have no doubt if an agency took an interest in my email, that within minutes they wouldn't be reading every email I ever sent, since my first email account. I'm not one hundred percent sure, but I'm pretty sure, that what would make the MOST SENSE to me, would be for every computer sold in the US, to have a key logger built into it, so that every single character was tracked and information sent to some massive processing and filtering location, some giant building full of the best comps money can buy. You could hide the fact that someones computer was transmitting all their data by requiring, say, constant "updates" and forcing it to send "error reports". And you could make it all about "state security" so that the companies could never say a word about it, or their executives would go to jail with a serious sentence.
Of course they are watching. And I see no reason they would allow us to "hack" up a way to get around it.
The internet is a car that I pay to borrow from the US Government, and there is a camera on the dashboard pointed right at me, watching every move I make while I am behind the wheel. I have no doubts about that.