Privacy, the right way
As this Slashdot commenter says:
When I was looking for a lawyer, I asked them how they contacted their clients, and where their email servers were located. The guy I eventually chose as my lawyer told me he contacts clients via email, phone and IM only to arrange face to face meetings, and then walked me down the hall to the server room.
Deep down, I don't really care about feds tapping phone lines or Skype listening on my conversations. That's not because I have nothing to hide (although I do have nothing to hide—but I'll never let you prove that) or simply don't care about privacy. That's because I deeply distrust these systems, enough that if it were sensitive information, I wouldn't be sending it over these networks. Here is my motto:
"Don't put anything in writing that I am not willing to post on a public website."
"Writing", for my purposes, means putting anything in a permanent form, which includes email, any communications over digital networks, and possibly phone (it's harder to ensure that it isn't recorded than person-to-person conversation). Personal conversations taking place during a walk in the park probably qualifies as not being "writing", if I trust the person I am talking to.
And although I haven't needed a legal service so far, if I ever need it, I am going to make sure that my lawyer has the same motto, too.
P.S. It's easy to interpret techies' concern for security and privacy as paranoia and dismiss it. Well, don't. It looks like paranoia because we understand the things a villain or the government (but I repeat myself) can do with technology—many members of the public, even those who consider themselves part of the elite, are only just now coming to grips with these new technologies. This is like chemists being "paranoid" about storing ethyl ether correctly—they are "paranoid" because they know how flammable those things are and how hard it is to put out such fires.