Lavabit.com Owner: 'I Could Be Arrested' For Resisting Surveillance Order 255
Zak3056 writes "NBC News is reporting that 'The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers. "I could be arrested for this action," Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden.''"
obama = a more palatable cheney (Score:5, Insightful)
simply the act of using encryption will make you a government suspect.
Re:Just comply with the court order (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it a legitimate Court Order? You presume something that is not assured to be in evidence. I strongly sugeest that you read the Fourth Amendment before any further remarks- just because the Government is doing something doesn't make it legal.
They Thought They Were Free (Score:5, Insightful)
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
But Then It Was Too Late [uchicago.edu]
Re:Just comply with the court order (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what the Court order was for.
If it was for specific conversation between specific address at a specific date/time then It's reasonable to comply.
But if it was for Everything since the service started or between 2 dates (i.e. 1st Jan 2011 to 31 Dec 2012) or from that point onwards, then it's a fishing expedition and its reasonable NOT to comply without further legal council and possible injunction (if that's possible with this kind of court order!)
Re:Just comply with the court order (Score:5, Insightful)
The word 'legal' has become entirely frivolous. The government can do what it wants, and no goddamn piece of paper is ever going to stop it.
Re:obama = a more palatable cheney (Score:2, Insightful)
It's pretty clear now why Microsoft never added encryption to Outlook.
(Except via 'certificates', which we can safely assume the government has access to...)
Why a SECRET order anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is the government bothering with secret court orders at this point? Do they think that maybe Snowden isn't aware that they are out to get him? If the government was above board with the situation, then perhaps people would be more willing to comply. Is there something in these orders that needs to be hidden from the public eye?
Just issue a regular warrant for the information. Nobody is arguing about those and they get the same results.
Unless there is more to this than is apparent.
(Although, cynical as I am, my first take on this article was not "Evil Government" but "Lavabit's Founders Are Trying To Drum Up Sympathy And Publicity For Their Next Venture". I just can't trust anyone these days ;-)
Re:So who is really in power in the United States? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is, then, in power of the United States if clearly not the legislative branch?
The business branch. The Department of State works for the arms merchants, and the Commerce Department for the Wall Street commodities markets.
Re:Just comply with the court order (Score:2, Insightful)
Technically, he is complying. He is giving the government all the information transferred from the service, which right now is nothing. If the government wants to force him to continue his business, that is another thing completely. I'd love to see the laws that allow the government to enslave a business order to continue a service that they own for secret government surveillance. The laws probably exist, but I'm guessing that they are classified Top Secret (where the FISA court has ruled that the 13th amendment is invalid).
Welcome to the USSA (Score:5, Insightful)
What a difference a mere few decades makes. This is exactly the type of thing that America historically mocked, derided and demonized the USSR and other "commie" or "evil" nations for doing. America is quite clearly demonstrating that their intentions are no less disingenuous.
The problem is not communism, not capitalism nor any other -ism. The problem is that the powerful will never satiate their craving for more power. Power absolutely despises being proven wrong and it will continue its scourge at all costs to cover up and misdirect conceptions.
This is what evil does when it's backed into a corner.
Re:Federal prison (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFA, he has raised $90,000 in the past few days. That seems to have helped. He has brought attention to legal conflicts that people should be talking about - that will help in a broader sense. It seems like you have given up any notion of progress. It's people who stand up and put things to the test who make a difference - no matter how big or small. If he goes to the joint over it, that's his choice. This media attention IMHO will be of benefit that could have the feds go easier on him because he's not just some unknown guy getting black bagged in an alley and stuffed into a room with no windows - blah, blah, blah.
Re:So who is really in power in the United States? (Score:4, Insightful)
(often misquoted: "Politics is the entertainment branch of the military-industrial complex" to good effect).
"Terrorism has hit every free state" (Score:4, Insightful)
Terrorism is nothing new. People have died from violent acts of insurgents since the beginning of history. The fact is, that terrorism is statistically insignificant as a cause of death. It has always been that way and it hasn't changed much. The leading cause of death "related to terrorism" is trying to fight it. Thousands of soldiers and civilians have gotten hurt and killed in "the war on terrorism" in situations that would not have occurred if this "war" hadn't been fought.
The leading cause of loss of freedom is fighting terrorism. There is no war. Stop calling it a war. There are clear definitions of what a war is and it has to be between two or more countries, or it has to be a "civil war" in which two or more parts of the same country go to war amongst themselves. Terrorism is nothing new and you're feeding it by giving it the attention it's after. The terrorists achieve more of their goals by this "war on terrorism" than they would if they were to be successful just a bit more often than they are now and we would ignore them. You can't fight this sort of terrorism anyway, since it's using every "freedom right" we want so much for ourselves, which our forefathers fought for so hard. If we give up those rights, we have nothing left to fight for and the terrorists have won.
The more you fight terrorism, the worse the situation gets. Let it go and enjoy your freedom. Don't spend money, lives and freedom on it. I'm not saying you should stop trying to prevent attacks, but you should stop giving up freedom and privacy for it.
Re:Why a SECRET order anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because a real court order, You can fight. You can enlist help, a professional lawyer or even contact others in the same situation and try to fight it together, not alone -- divide et impera rings any bells? You can inform the public about the proceedings and the scope of the court order, the information required by the law, or rather what data was leaked to the secret services. A non-secret court allows for scrutiny, compliance with constitution, law and last and also least, morality. You can check it for corruption. An open court is less likely to be taking sides. And so on and so on, You know, things that a rising dictature is not really keen on.
Re:Just comply with the court order (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon, make up your mind. Respect the court or the fellow citizens, you can't have both.
Re:They Thought They Were Free (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Samuel Adams was writing about you:
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
Re:Just comply with the court order (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately the legislative branch has systematically reduced the effectiveness of the judicial branch. I am talking tort reform. I am talking about threatening activist judges. I am talking about secret court order and secret courts. Without an equal court system democracy just does not work and things like this happen. Manning and Snoden and all these leaks are due to the lack of due process. If Manning had not been isolated and tortured, it would not nearly be the black eye on the US, and Snoden likely would not be in Russia.
The courts provide an alternative to extreme and violent acts. Let's say that a child that is killed by a defective Ikea bed. The parents can go to court, have the company be publicly held responsible for the death, and, outside of tort reform, receive a judgement that will encourage the company to do better in the future. Or the parents could just go to location where they bought the bed and justifiably kill the person who sold them the bed, or go to corporate and justifiably kill the executives who profited from the bed, etc. Which one actually leads to a safer world?
So really the problem is that some powerful people are upset because the courts do not allow them to sufficiently oppress the people or murder customers, so the want to reduce our government to the two branches that can effectively be bribed to engage in unnecessary and illegal activities, like spying on US citizens, which invariable requires massive purchases of inflated sales and products which invariably increases the profits of those companies. A classic example in the war in Iraq, which was facilitated by the purchase of an election by those who wanted Dick Cheney in the executive, and the subsequent transfer of taxpayer treasure directly to those who bought him.
Re:Inevitable consequence of unfettered capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
> The USSR sucked. The USA sucks.
Ummmm, actual measurements of wealth and longevity disagreed. This is a meme lodged in your head that is not in accordance with reality. You should go about fixing it.
Re:Inevitable consequence of unfettered capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the USA had nearly a century and a half head start, I wouldn't expect the USSR to have come close to catching up with it. And yet we're talking about differences in life expectancy of a few years, and very nearly irrelevant definitions of "wealth" when we contrast the models of service provision.
For example, when I lived in the US, I was able to earn a lot more money than in the UK. But it was worth a lot less, as private insurance is an inefficient rip-off vs British healthcare and social safety net. There's really little opportunity for comfort in the US except for a small proportion of people: the majority work far more hours than are needed to sustain a decent lifestyle for the whole country. Western continental Europe does so much better.
I have a brief personal experience with the end of the USSR, and my family worked for a car firm which did business there under Khrushchev. Sure, it sucked too, but not in the terrific way caricatured by Western propaganda.
So, it's a "meme" which I've lodged in my head based on personal experience - and a concerted attempt to enjoy and appreciate both extremes. And that's before we bring in the experiences of everyone else.
Re:Inevitable consequence of unfettered capitalism (Score:-1, Insightful)
Capitalism is private ownership and operation of property, nothing else.
Free market is market that is no manipulated by the powerful governments that have legal and or illegal authority to take away your freedoms.
You are blaming private ownership and operation of property for government stealing individual freedoms by legally or illegally taking away personal freedoms (destroying free market). That is not an insightful comment, it has nothing to do with logic, it is based on emotion and lack of information or deliberate propaganda that is aimed at increasing the power of the state and taking away individual liberties.
Saying: we must BOTH limit powers of the government and limit powers of the individuals is complete nonsense or propaganda.
What must be done is limiting powers of the government and punish individuals for criminal activity (activity that is aimed at hurting other individuals, murder, rape, theft, other violence).
There is no such thing as: limiting both, power of the government and power of the individuals. Governments have awesome powers, that must be always kept in check. Government is evil by its very definition because it has huge power over any one particular individual. Government is a collectivist idea that puts an individual at a gigantic, immeasurable disadvantage compared to the collective (the mob).
As to "social democracy" - that's a disastrous idea with disastrous consequences. Democracy is dictatorship of the mob, which eventually reduces to the dictatorship of an individual. "Social" means collective, anti-individual. So in reality what you are in fact promoting is dictatorship and slavery.
Re:Inevitable consequence of unfettered capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering the USA had nearly a century and a half head start,
So the USSR sprang up from nothing in the north of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia? Russia never existed?
Re:American Justice (Score:0, Insightful)
Well, feel free to leave. Adios!
You're not the only one that's frustrated with our government, but there are ways of fixing it -- hint: there are more than two political parties to vote for, either of which is eager to take away your rights. However, if you don't like the freedom that you have in the US, perhaps you need to become a citizen of a different country. Being able to voice your dismay about the government and having the comfort of knowing that there won't be a knock on your door with soldiers coming to get you is a good thing.
Your concept of justice is as flawed as your concept of freedom. Justices and judges do NOT get to rule based on their own personal preferences. In fact, there are no courts of justice anywhere in the US; there are courts of law. If the law says that given suspicion X about company Y, that company Y can be compelled to turn over normally private information -- then that's the law. Do you really think that your (or the judge's) concept of justice comes into play at all when approving those subpoenas? The courts are not the problem. The problem is that democratically elected lawmakers created those laws that are now being enforced. The laws are the problem, and our congressmen are the problem, but the judges are simply doing their job -- doing what the law compels them to do. You wouldn't blame cars for driving 80 mph past your house if there were speed signs that said the speed limit was 80 mph, would you?
Democrats and Republicans have done an equally good job at stripping our rights -- usually using secret laws to keep the public from knowing about it and which also gag anyone involved from telling the public about it. Still, 95%+ of the people that vote are going to vote Democrat or Republican, so nothing is going to change. In that respect, the problem isn't even the government officials making the laws that the judges have to honor and police/soldiers need to enforce, it's the people's fault. We collectively get the government that we deserve.
While it may seem extreme, Jim Crow laws sound fantastic to me, but obviously without the bias against race/ethnicity (which is stupid). Instead, the bias should be against the uneducated. If you don't know what a candidate is promising to do, or what they've done in the past (if they were previously elected), then you don't get to vote. If you vote [insert political party here] only because it's "who you are", and your family votes for that party, and your friends vote for that party, you don't get to vote. If you vote for a party because your pastor says that it's a sin to vote the other way, then you don't get to vote. If you think that the president of the US gets to decide gas prices, you don't get to vote. Why should an uneducated vote have as much weight as someone who has taken the time to actually understand how government works, investigate each candidate, and then make an educated vote? There's a reason that doctors don't choose their treatments by popular vote in the waiting room. But for some reason, it's okay for uneducated Americans to vote -- most of whom have no idea that rights have even been stripped away.
More realistically, I hope that one day the US gets runoff voting. That's the only thing that will ever break our two-party system, because until then, voting any other way is just throwing the vote away. There are political parties that are appalled with what's going on... but they have no chance of doing anything about it. And the political parties in power will never allow runoff voting in the US for exactly that reason.