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Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

theguardian.com

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Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#61

Post by walid »

monsterix wrote: post #49
talmand wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't new, this was why Hoover stayed in power for so long. He had files on everyone. Remember, information is power.

Is there a way for people to initiate impeachment of Obama / get rid of scumbags from the Government given the number of lies and mess that's already out there? Like it or not but a lot of non-American users see these actions like a bid to take over the Internet. It is a sort of waging a war against the rest of the world. Treating ordinary citizens from outside America default as terrorists and subjecting 'em to roun…

True, the NSA doesn't respect the privacy of any non-American on the planet in bulk. This is more than just a privacy violation. Also the NSA might respect an Americans privacy if they are farther than three hops from a foreigner, kinda like saying they don't.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#62

Post by kghose »

I have a counter-current question (and I feel that this should be a legitimate site for asking such questions, because we are all hackers here).

Were lavabit, groklaw profitable and/or widely popular?

Is it possible that these are sites that are not profitable and would have been shutdown anyway but which are now using privacy as an excuse for shutting down?

This does not excuse the misuse of governmental powers, but if it is true, it is a distraction (and a cynical manipulation of our views).

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#63

Post by joering2 »

supercanuck wrote: post #33

We need a whistleblower law. A good one, like one that is embedded in the consitution that protects people from speaking out.

We already have one. It means nothing.

http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/

Scroll down to: Protect Whistleblowers

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#64

Post by lmickh »

walshemj wrote: post #25
rlpb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I'd also like to add a more specific cause to this idea. Like you say, technical measures aren't a bad idea either, but only drag things on. My political view is this: both the right to communicate and the privacy of communications need to be treated as a fundamental human rights, just as freedom of speech is currently treated. Then there are subjective measures. Breaching these rights may be warranted i…

but in the us freedom of speech is not universally applied ie you employer can sack you for what you say for example "oh maybe we should organize a union" or maybe "the NHS model is a good idea" Any changes need to apply universally and not just to the government.

That is pretty much the definition of freedom of speech universally applied. You are free to say what you want and your employer is free to say things like "you're fired."

Freedom of speech != speech without consequence.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#65

Post by reitzensteinm »

talmand wrote: post #46
alan_cx wrote: post #30

I hope those who treated me with scorn for suggesting the politicians and business people are effectively blackmailed by the mere existence of NSA type spying can now see it for real. No direct threat, not conversation, no deals. Just the fear of the knowledge that one is being comprehensively watched, and what "they" might have. This fear is enough to alter behavior, to conform. Again, at what stage can we describe…

This isn't new, this was why Hoover stayed in power for so long. He had files on everyone. Remember, information is power.

Great point, and this is a big reason why the "I have nothing to hide" argument comes from a position of childlike naivety.

Even if you have nothing to hide, what about your members of parliament? CEOs? Mayors? President or Prime Minister? Judges? Police chiefs?

Is there a single one that has never written an email or made a phone call that could destroy their career? What lengths would they go to in order to keep it private? Do you honestly expect them to fall on their sword for the good of the nation?

Giving a shadowy group with essentially no oversight access to damn near every skeleton in the closet society has under the guise of "security" is analogous stuffing your house with munitions and trusting your kids not to play with matches.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#66

Post by swayvil »

kghose wrote: post #62

I have a counter-current question (and I feel that this should be a legitimate site for asking such questions, because we are all hackers here). Were lavabit, groklaw profitable and/or widely popular? Is it possible that these are sites that are not profitable and would have been shutdown anyway but which are now using privacy as an excuse for shutting down? This does not excuse the misuse of governmental powers, but…

iirc the lavabit guy was making 100k a year.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#68

Post by monsterix »

hga wrote: post #60
monsterix wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way for people to initiate impeachment of Obama / get rid of scumbags from the Government given the number of lies and mess that's already out there? Like it or not but a lot of non-American users see these actions like a bid to take over the Internet. It is a sort of waging a war against the rest of the world. Treating ordinary citizens from outside America default as terrorists and subjecting 'em to roun…

The remedies are the power of the purse, which won't necessarily be followed but which we are attempting and got very close in the first vote in the House, and/or impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, which is an inherently political act. In practice, as the political lay of the land is today, I'm not even sure Obama would be impeached and convicted if he were "caught in bed with either a dead girl o…

Agreed. But since this is about catching everyone else in bed on the planet it gets far more serious than a ... say a Monica Lewinsky episode. I believe breach of privacy globally is a very serious offence and it should be measured as such.

You and I bearing licensable firearms from the pop and mom stores is absolutely no parallel to the capability that the agencies possess. Strength of gun laws seems suspect in the era of drones, robotics and the goldmine of everyone's data and emotions.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#69

Post by raverbashing »

saalweachter wrote: post #54
toyg wrote: post #6

This is a tragedy. We need to reboot email. Encrypt everything, including metadata -- given current hardware, the client can easily bruteforce it from a list of known keys. Build some sort of easy key distribution tool (connecting via p2p, dns, whatever, just build a goddamn UI). Ask existing transports to relax their restrictions enough to let fully-encrypted mail through, and build some intelligent webmail interfac…

I think we need to go one step further than encryption. We need to encrypt all communications expensively . Make algorithms which can be tuned to be arbitrarily expensive, computation-wise. Tune them so that it takes as much time as we can bear to encrypt and decrypt an email. Seconds, ideally. The goal is to make it so that some large fraction of our computational resources are taken up encrypting and decrypting com…

Which is funny, because that's the idea behind bitcoin, you get 'money' because you did work.

The weird thing of course is that the work is completely 'useless'

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#70

Post by basseq »

kghose wrote: post #62

I have a counter-current question (and I feel that this should be a legitimate site for asking such questions, because we are all hackers here). Were lavabit, groklaw profitable and/or widely popular? Is it possible that these are sites that are not profitable and would have been shutdown anyway but which are now using privacy as an excuse for shutting down? This does not excuse the misuse of governmental powers, but…

Or, put another way, there were likely a confluence of factors that led to security/surveillance (ostensibly) being the "straw that broke the camel's back"—the latest development that took the risk/reward level over the owner's threshold.

How close they were to that threshold anyway, what other factors were in play, whether the perceived threat was evaluated realistically, and other questions are reasonable to ask.

I hadn't heard of Lavabit before they shuttered themselves. I had visited Grokalaw on several occasions (often via HN), but have no idea of its profitability or alignment with its authors goals.

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