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Lavabit abruptly shuts down

lavabit.com

231–240 of 671 posts

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#231
post #149

One big question I have for the legal beagles: It's understood (if not well-liked) that Fourth Amendment protections don't apply to data given to a third-party... What if, instead, you host server space within the U.S. and run your own software (email, listserv, whatever) and data on the leased hardware? I would think there's a good argument that Fourth Amendment protections then resume, and the domestic-ness of the…

I was thinking the same thing. Micro-virtualization for everything, to make it clear that the end-user owns their data.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accountability and culture. German intelligence services are "weaker" in the sense that they (seemlingly) still are under the control of the legislative body (secret contracts with the Western Allies sadly nonwithstanding). They are also regarded with deep distrust by large parts of the populace and by a significant segment of the legislature. It is quite possbible that, come September, some of the government parties…

>Accountability and culture The culture that brought us the SS and the Stasi.

Bad memories of those periods are a non-trivial part of why they are surveillance adverse today.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#233
post #143

So we've hear stories of the big companies being targeted. Now a smaller company has been included. How small will this go for monitoring? Should we assume that any browser plugins are potential trojan horses for desktop targeting?

Why stop there? You can probably bully the smaller open source programmers who work on various utilities to backdoor their programs.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#234
post #39

Takeaway: > "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States." It's kind of fitting. The nation that spawned the internet is the nation that's killing the internet biz on its own turf.

I wonder if there is some historical regularity here. After all, my own country, "Das Land der Dichter und Denker" turned on its "Dichter und Denker" when it was at (or close to) the apex of intellectual achievement.

Yes, there is a strong parallel between pre-Nazi Germany and current USA. Of course, Americans will not literally follow Nazi ideology.

What we see in America is an increasing merger between industry and government. Finance is the most regulated sector; hence "too big to fail" and all the exploits pulled by big banks. Telecom is almost completely government controlled (through the graning of regulatory monopolies). The government spies on everyone all the time now. This is the fulfillment of Progressivism: regular people are ignorant, but we can fix all social ills through government control. It is also, literally, the fascist model. I sound like an immature teenager for saying that, but I mean it in the full, intellectual sense.

tl;dr the American Progressive movement occurred in parallel, but to a must greater extent, in Weimar Germany. American Neo-conservativism is Progressivism in a right-wing flavor. The modern USA is Weimar Germany all over again.

As the USA's societal ills continue to accelerate (because we're taking anti-corrective action instead of corrective action at every step), the USA will increasingly resemble a command-and-control system like Nazi Germany.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#235
So this is the reality. 100% proven that there is utterly NO privacy nor any "legal" defense against the spying of the NSA.

America has NO 4th amendment rights and encryption is now a criminal activity.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#236
post #184
post #12

From 2011: > Lavabit processes 70 gigabytes of data per day, is made up of 26 servers, hosts 260,000 email addresses, and processes 600,000 emails a day. That’s a lot of email. http://www.dbasoul.com/2011/1008.html Update: According to their stats page, they had 410k email accounts hosted before shutdown https://twitter.com/georgemaschke/status/365553445538775040

70 GB / 600K emails = 122KB per email. That's a large average even with headers. To put things in perspective, Costco's massive marketing email sent to me this morning is 138K including headers. So the question is, what were people sending though Lavabit that averaged 122K and would have attracted attention? Therein probably lies the reason for all of this.

The 70GB probably includes attachments, so quite a bit of that number could just be certain users sending large attachments on a regular basis.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#237
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if, more than crypto, false positives would make them work harder. They know who you are emailing too, and so likely are not going to target you in any case, since you are not part of an interesting network. But if you start talking about a movie, where they plan to detonate a dirty bomb in Times Square or something... Emacs automates this with M-x spook: morse War on Terrorism encryption Forte Blowpipe LLNL…

6 degrees, though. The network of connecting one person to any other person on the earth is usually quite small. Hmm.. here's a silly idea. A peer to peer network, let's go with a cool web-2.0-ey name like Chaffr, that assigns you a GUID and establishes a stream of truly random (or pseudorandom) data which is propagated out via a P2P system kinda the same way Tor nodes communicate with each other. This stream of nois…

They can buy hard drives much faster than the 2000 people who would run such a thing can upload data. It's a nice thought, though.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#238
How in the hell are national security letters constitutional? It's mindboggling to me that they haven't reached the Supreme Court. I don't mean to sound like a hippie or patriotic douche, but it seem rather tyrannical that you aren't even allowed to talk about something that happened to you.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#239

> I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Anyone know what happens if he just says "F it" and writes a massive blog post on what exactly happened or what exactly they said to him?

He moves (or rather has already moved) to Russia.

Sounds like Bolivia or Venezuela would probably be a better first stop.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#240
post #204
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a warrant, but honestly we don't know if that isn't the case here. It's come up before that the NSA, FBI et al, serve warrants for encrypted data and can demand it be decrypted. Otherwise, services like lavabit are equivalent to Swiss bank accounts that are unreachable by any means, legitimate or otherwise. Realistically, this service was almost certainly hosting a ton a illegal activities.

Well there we go then, Constitutional Fourth Amendment protections restored. But why do I get the impression that's not actually what we all were really asking for here?

There are multiple overreaches.

In this case the government is probably trying to pull a hushmail: getting the service provider to install spying equipment targeted at their users, and then sharing the spy data with the government.

1. The government should not be able to force this kind of spy equipment to be installed.

2. If we had good privacy laws it would be illegal for the company to even willingly share this data without a warrant.

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