I'm worried about all that stuff too, particularly the unified database they were talking about under ID cards, with hundreds of thousands of busybodies having access.

I'm just saying that while I knew it was trivially easy to read email just by sniffing the wire, while I knew that they could do this and probably were, that doesn't mean that I expect that sort of behaviour from a democratic government or that that expectation amounts to a sort of implicit permission to treat the data as public.

For a counterpoint - email from government departments comes with footer text claiming it private and confidential!

I think we are probably using expect in slightly different, nuanced ways. I may expect that they do it (in the sense I think it's likely) because I'm a realist and also a cynic. But in other ways I don't expect it (in the sense I don't think it's reasonable behaviour).