311–320 of 671 posts
So, I ask again: at what point is it reasonable to use words like fascist, police state, etc? What is a reasonable tipping point?
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Hello, I didn't say stand up to, but for (i.e. on behalf of) . The most he can do is stand up to the government, for his users, in court, deleting servers would not be a wise move, and I wouldn't expect it of him, would you? Just standing up and saying no in a climate like this takes some courage, for which I admire him.
by the time he is done wish courts defending their users, Feds will be given chances to copy all users data over and over again about 250 times. So it doesn't matter whether he loses or wins. Not a bit.
It was too late for his users' data the moment representatives of the government walked through the door of their data centre/offices, but their rights he can stand up for, which is what he has done.
You know, all these counter measures we come up with are just 'patches' to a set of bugs in our society. We need to rewrite the damn thing. This will just become a cat and mouse game against our own gov't and indirect defensive movements are meaningless without some sort of offensive to change policy. This is becoming a full blown arms race over people's private information. The funding, the computational power, the…
This kind of dragnet communication surveillance was literally impossible in the 1960s. The social world is still changing in reaction to the existence of the birth control pill. Hell our social reality has already been fundamentally changed on many levels by facebook & smartphones world wide. It's a balance of both.
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I'm sure they would argue that you weren't supposed to reveal that you were under an NSL, and that your inaction did reveal it, so you violated the terms. As the grandparent says, it probably just a cute legal trick that wouldn't impress a judge.
Maybe, but expecting a false oath makes a mockery of the entire testimonial system.
If the judge says "don't paint your wall red" that means "or anything close by any means".
It doesn't matter you tried to hack your way out with an automatic vermillion paint flinger setup before the order. You still are supposed to "make the wall not get painted red".
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Don't choose Germany. We may have strict privacy laws here, but we also have the BND cooperating with the NSA, tapping directly into the main internet nodes (Frankfurt). And don't forget that part of the method of the NSA is to use a mule inside the target company, which would be very easy in Germany given its status of being a wannabe ally of the USA and the longstanding sympathy of the german public for the USA. An…
"And Germany has also laws which force every mail provider to install an access point to the German authorities and intelligence agencies. I am not sure if also a generic saas platform would have to do it, but it is quite possible." Thanks for the heads up - as I said in the OP, it really is a difficult task. Those kind of laws are exactly what need to be avoided when choosing a country to host in. I don't believe th…
It's up on github, so hopefully everyone can submit pull requests with data and we can crowd source ourselves a very informative map.
https://github.com/Ryan-ZA/hosting_safety_map
EDIT: I also submitted a link to it on HN. Hopefully interested people will see it and can help out with data.
For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers. The linked email would lend some credence to those claims. It was originally designed in contrast to gmail scanning your email for targeted advertising, but my imperfect memory says that their system should also have been resilient to "we…
It seems like the most secure way to send a message these days might be snail mail. While I know the feds to open it from time to time in specific cases, they definitely don't open all.
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It is just as bad or worse. You have to move the data in/out of the country. It definitely isn't protected when it leaves the country. The only advantage I see is that it punishes US businesses for failing to protest.
I don't blame the companies; they're about as much a victim of USgov as we are IMHO. That being said, if all the online-storage/cloud-server/email-providers/social-whatever companies in US start going out of business because nobody trusts them I strongly suspect something will have to change. It's just too bad we have to do a "scorched earth"[1] to bring about change. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth
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.