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Say what you mean. Don't dance around begging for me to speak your own words for you.

You made a very specific claim. To wit: "On the one hand you claim that it doesn't matter if only machines are reading internet messages, but then on the other hand you claim to have an issue with machines reading internet messages."

You're refusing to quote where I said that because I didn't say it. You are, in short, a liar.

Packets of information passing through computers is fine, that's how the internet works. A person other than the intended receiver reading it, catching it as it passes over his computer or at any other time, is wrong unless there's a warrant.

You need to admit that your comparision between passing through a computer in the function of the internet and someone reading it is apples and oranges. In other words, that you were wrong. Grant the point, and move on.

"Packets of information passing through computers is fine, that's how the internet works. A person other than the intended receiver reading it, catching it as it passes over his computer or at any other time, is wrong unless there's a warrant."

That's basically a contradiction in terms. Every packet of data on the internet is read by software on multiple machines, none of whom will end up being the intended receiver. A router in particular will examine numerous packets, but only pass a few through it. A cable modem will see every packet sent into its local loop, yet it will only pass those with a certain IP on to its owner. Yet you want to claim that the cable-modem is wrong to read messages that don't belong to its owner. That just isn't how the Internet is designed.

"You need to admit that your comparision between passing through a computer in the function of the internet and someone reading it is apples and oranges. In other words, that you were wrong. Grant the point, and move on."

I simply compared various government machines that all ran various software programs, all of which read every packet of data traffic on the internet and pass it on. That looks like apples to apples, not oranges, to me.

Perhaps a simpler technical examples would aid you. Consider packet radio. Packet radio has a satellite transmitter that broadcasts all data traffic (that belongs to its sum total sub group of users). Every packet radio receiver reads every data packet, even though the vast majority of those packets are not destined for its owner. The packets with the owners IP get passed to the owner's computer. NOTE: every packet was read by every machine in that scenario, but the packet radios don't need search warrants to legally read all of those packets, betraying your claim above.

Taking this scenario even further, there is nothing wrong with a user attaching a sniffer (that's a device which reads and displays ALL packets in plain text as they pass through) on the packet radio to diagnose technical problems (even if the user has no warrant).

In fact, the odds are that your average daily land-based internet data traffic will pass through numerous corporate and government machines while a sniffer is attached to diagnose a technical problem (displaying the contents of your data in plain text all the while), yet a warrant is not required for this behavior. That is because such data traffic is generally considered to be just as public on the information super-hiway as is your car on an interstate freeway.

And you don't need new laws to protect your privacy, either. You just need to go to the effort of using encryption. Just as writing a note on a postcard isn't going to give you much privacy, sending open text over the Internet isn't very secure. Likewise, enclosing your message in an envelope (be it encrypted or physical) will provide privacy.