[grey-area]

That would be helpful but ultimately will not address this as it needs to be made clear to governments that they are not welcome in our private lives except under cover of a specific investigation and public warrant. Encryption would be helpful but if the government compels your email provider to hand over your stored emails or just email headers they can still get a lot of information about you even if you always use encryption to send/receive and try to encrypt content that you send. Even just your IP logs tell a tale of your location potentially over your entire life.

In addition to things you control there are many sources of metadata (phone records, bank records, online services, shopping records, web searches/visits, forum comments, unencrypted emails from companies and others) which are really intrusive if made public in aggregate, and with the recent assertion by the US administration that all these records have no expectation of privacy (because you shared them with someone or a company), encrypting just your emails will seem like a hollow victory when the government can collate and analyse all of your activity, online and anything offline which leaves a digital trail, for your entire life.

I do wonder whether the coming of age of a new generation, and the discovery of this widespread invasion of privacy in the name of fighting terror, will erode still further the allegiance to national governments we still feel and lead to supra-national collectives on the internet having more and more sway in our lives. After the hubristic actions of our governments and their pretentions to omniscience about our lives ('mastering the internet', 'total information awareness' etc), our interests as citizens seem to me much closer aligned with other users on the internet and far less aligned with either corporate or national interests.

[kamjam]

Encryption would be helpful but if the government compels your email provider to hand over your stored emails or just email headers they can still get a lot of information about you

Exactly, this the line that the government has currently been using, that they only store "metadata" about communications and not the messages themselves, so encryption would no real difference.