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Encrypted Email Provider Lavabit Shuts Down, Blames US Gov't
clorkster writes to note the following explanation posted to the front page of encrypted email provider Lavabit: "'I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. 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. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.' No doubt this has much to do with Snowden's use of the provider."
I once lived there. I've been a tourist there a couple of times. I don't think I'll ever set mu foot there again. Good luck.
I applaud him for taking a stance against the snooping. Unfortune that he had to shut the service down though. Maybe he can move it offshore.
So when Obama boycotts a meeting with the Russians due to concerns over "human rights", you may now know that this is a lie.
No, it's been this. Now it's just getting worse and getting more public exposure.
It would probably be worst. Remember who actually enacted these laws.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You think Romney or Hillary Clinton or any of the Bushes would have done anything different? Only candidates that would would try to put an end to the corruption and abuse of power in the American system these days would be Ron or Rand Paul. They will never get elected because all the powers that be fear and hate them. If, by some fluke, they did get elected by the actual American voters, inspite of the negative media bombardment aimed at them, they would be assassinated in months.
@de_machina
It would probably be worst. Remember who actually enacted these laws.
And remember who ran under the platform with one of the key points being that he would repeal them.
In my mind, disallowing people from criticizing government actions and government policy is a serious violation of the First Amendment. It is exactly what the First Amendment was written to prevent. I hope someone will challenge this issue in court.
I am surprised the government let him shut down. That action alone probably violated the gag order.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I do not think that, but I do think that the House and Senate are even more to blame. They wrote the laws and passed them, complete with a raft of deal-sweeteners attached, knowing that no sane POTUS would veto something that "protects us from teh terrorists".
The operator of Lavabit CAN legally discuss what is happening. He cannot *safely* do so, because our government does not obey the law, and will punish him for exercising his first amendment rights.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Clearly the operator of Lavabit received a national security letter or warrant which he objected to.
Now since Lavabit is based on normal mail protocols, the operator has the ability to see all the data when it comes in, and obviously with a warrant or NSL, the provider can be compelled to provide the information to the feds. But I suspect that the request was not just something mild ("This sleazebag's mail account") but something broader, given the reaction was to close down the service completely.
In any case, this is also a great reminder of why the cloud, especially US cloud providers, can't be trusted. Companies who care about security are going to have to abandon the cloud and go back to insourcing their infrastructure.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Why isn't the entire Republican party standing up for this provider, telling government to get out of the way of business? He built that! Now, if he's been a multi-trillion dollar bank, the government would leave him alone, hell, he'd be telling the government what to do.
This is just another example of "might makes right, we're a bully, and we're going to push the world around, usa #1 F-yeah!"
We are living in a police state; there's no doubt about that at this point.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.
Congress does not have the authority to violate the Constitution. They can "pass" all the bullshit "laws" they want, but the fact remains that there is not a soul in the federal government who has the power to supersede our Constitutional Liberties. The only, ONLY legitimate way to alter the content of said document would be via a Constitutional Amendment approved by 2/3 of all state legislatures, or by the formation of a Constitutional Congress. Neither of these events have occurred, therefore your right to tell us that the NSA is trying to force you to turn over your encryption keys stands firm. Fuck you Stasi dogfuckers ('cuz I know you're skimming this).
FYI, by making such a statement, and doing as they tell you, you're only helping them perpetuate the myth that they can do this kind of shit and get away with it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I think we all lost the 2012 elections.
"Lavabit - an encrypted email service which is used by pedophiles and terrorist networks - was shut down after refusing to give the government access to important data that could have lead to arrests."
Rand and Ron Paul would not be assassinated. What would happen to them would be far worse.... for us! They would quietly settle into the same patterns that Bush and Obama did. They are politicians, nothing more. They would make grand statements, something large (but not too large) and mostly symbolic would happen ("We're finally closing Gitmo! ....... and shipping all prisoners to a Saudi Torture chamber."), and then when the initial fervor died down, and after a few key meetings, they would realize the "necessity" of surveillance on everyone in America and abroad.
Put simply: we're kind of fucked.
Yeah he could give you warning, and then wait for the drone-express or gitmo. Why would you be smart enough to use encrypted email, and dumb enough not to have a backup of your email archive?
We didn't 'lose' it. We gave it up freely of our own volition.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You have got to be shitting me. Ron and Rand Paul are may not be beholden to the status quo, but they are not the libertarians they claim to be. They are theocrats and racists who want to tear down equality and justice in America.
Gary Johnson is a better Libertarian that either Pauls, and he is a god damn supporter of the modern slavery movement (for profit prison industrial work farms).
Thanks for highlighting that link. I just contributed. It's time for slashdotters to put their money where their mouths are.
They will never get elected because, with the possible exception of this issue, most of their positions are considered lunatic fringe. It has nothing to do with fear or hate and everything to do with them simply being unacceptable candidates.
Show me someone whose social and corporate positions are reasonably to Obama's, but with a more reasoned position on domestic spying, the TSA, etc. and I'll show you a candidate I'd vote for. Instead, you're showing me someone whose social positions seem to be reasonably close to Walt Disney's, and whose corporate positions are reasonably close to John D. Rockefeller's.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I think it would be wise to consider that perhaps the reason you had no warning was that Lavabit's operators also had no warning. (That is, no warning of the specific event which caused them to make the decision to shut down. Obviously they knew something was afoot, as we can see by the posted message from them.)
The operators of Lavabit have gone waaaaaay out on a limb for you today. They're risking ten years of work, their livelihood, their finances, and their freedom. I think -- even though this obviously inconveniences you and others -- you might want to give them a little slack. I think it's obvious on inspection that they're doing this on principle, and THAT is worthy of respect -- doubly so when many of their peers have chosen otherwise, as is now becoming more clear every day.
Only candidates that would would try to put an end to the corruption and abuse of power in the American system these days would be Ron or Rand Paul.
Or Gary Johnson, or John Huntsman, or Jill Stein, or several other people who didn't manage to make it onto prime-time national debates.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
We do know that the actions of the government in this case are illegal, because Lavabit's ability to respond to this search has been silenced by the coercive power of the government.
Any judicial programs which are exempted from public oversight are unconstitutional by nature.
After all, if the means used were legal, reasonable, and would be supported by civil society, there would be no reason to hide them from the public. Right?
...and he is a god damn supporter of the modern slavery movement (for profit prison industrial work farms).
He also vetoed more bills as a governor of New Mexico than any other governor, from any other state, in history (if my memory serves me correctly).
Yes, he's a politician like any other, but this single fact alone puts him a bit above the rest. The bureaucratic weight that is crushing this country is generated by endless legislation. We are managing a 21st century nation with 200 year old methods. It's time to modernize and clean house.
Much like cleaning out a garage, we'll have to make a large organized mess in the yard if we intend to get it clean.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Are you kidding? He was reelected in 2012, after four years of acting like a GW Bush clone.
We forgot really fucking quickly.
"Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."
-- President Barrack Obama, January 21, 2009
I think we all lost the last four Presidential elections.
Most anyone using the service as anything but a status symbol probably appreciates if it goes poof rather than being handed over.
He who lives his life by taking famous quotations and applying them to different situations without context, makes trivial points.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The cloud movement could have been the next great economic success (mostly in the US), but instead the entire economic opportunity is being shut-down by the very government that it would most benefit.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Would you have preferred to find out 6 months from now that carnivore had a copy of all of your email?
If you're facing a secret court order to log everything from this point forward, your only ethical option is to make sure there's nothing to log.
I've been modded up, which is fantastic, but to be honest I was hoping to provoke discussion.
What I was thinking when I wrote the above post (and was more sober) was that this issue is affecting regular people. I'm a real person! I live in an apartment in midtown Atlanta! I have a trilobite collection and I like to take long walks. I'm preparing dinner for some friends tomorrow evening. I'm a savvy Internet user, like the rest of you, who reflexively discounts conspiracy theories. But my email provider was just taken down because it provided too much privacy.
Godwin's Law prevents me from typing many of my thoughts right now. I know from experience that everyone's weary from constant political combat. I was even in Washington D.C. (well, Richmond; the DC subways weren't working that day) for the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity, which emphasized the importance of getting along with your neighbors, even if they disagreed with your politics. And besides, I didn't do anything about the Snowden revelation, even though I consciously understood it was a Bad Thing.
But here I am today with no email because (we assume) the Federal government presented Ladar Levison with an ultimatum: either break his own security and tell nobody, or stop providing the service altogether. (Fortunately Levison did what I paid him to do: he stood up for my privacy and let Lavabit go down.) But we can't be sure that this is what transpired because of Levison has been under a gag order for six weeks. This is a terrifying concept.
Has anyone on Slashdot watched Babylon 5? It had a long story arc in which the Earth government gradually became more and more repressive. There was an episode in the middle of Season 3 called "Severed Dreams" in which the Interstellar News Network (ISN) was forcibly brought offline by the military. Right before they went off the air, an anchor came onscreen, apologized for interrupting, reported that some colonies had declared independence and that the president didn't want that information let out, and that many things had been going on for a year that ISN was not allowed to report. Some explosions damaged the building, ISN went offline, and a week later, it came back with a new (completely unfamiliar) news anchor who calmly explained that terrorists had faked the previous broadcast.
That's how I feel about Lavabit right now. I've been watching the Snowden news for months. Then my email went down... And then suddenly I'm hit with this speech that for the last six weeks, Lavabit's founder has been fighting to protect my privacy while under a gag order, and twice has tried to get that order lifted. But he failed and now I have to go change my email address everywhere it's used. Wow! I never imagined that the drama on the news, where the United States tried to promise Russia that we wouldn't torture one of our own citizens were he extradited, would have a direct impact on my insignificant life! But it did. And apparently Lavabit has been fighting for the last six weeks, while I've been going to work, trying to talk pretty girls into dinner, and going jogging around the neighborhood. This is real! These issues aren't going away. I ignored them and I lost my email account. What will I lose next?
Please, Slashdot. Please, please, please take this seriously. This isn't just another petty Internet squabble. This is serious business. I got caught in the crossfire early because I cared enough about my privacy to use Lavabit. Other people got caught in it earlier---Manning and Snowden because they had both moral courage and access to incriminating information, and probably many other people of Pakistani descent because that's just how things go. I got caught in it today. When will the rest of you get caught? GMail users are safe from shutdowns because even in 2009 we knew that Google didn't care about your privacy, but I wouldn't be surprised that the stakes will continue to increase as time wears on.
Maybe I deserve to be alone in this mess because I left Manning, Snowden, and probably untold others in the lurch when they needed support. Yes, I probably do...
"I'm perfectly happy with free elections, as long as I get to select the nominees!" - Boss Tweed, 1890s.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I have a hypothesis that it is impossible for anyone who would actually be a good President to get through the nomination process. This hypothesis has proved valid for a couple of decades now.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Where at least I know I'm free!
-- Robert Heinlein
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
All these do not have to come to pass if not for that "Human Rights Watch"
They are the one who revealed Snowden's use of Lavabit when they intentionally posted Snowden's message along with his email addy, edsnowden@lavabit.com
The "Human Righs Watch" are helping Uncle Sam more than helping Edward Snowden.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You claimed that you have just moved to US four months ago, and the other fella, four years.
Both of you are so gung ho on the States.
If neither of you are trolls, good for you !
I came from China. In the 1960's I swam to Hong Kong, soldiers were shooting at us back then.
Via Europe I ended up in the Unted States of America in the late 1960's.
When I first landed there, indeed, the States was SUPER WONDERFUL, there were democracy, there were human rights, there were freedom, and people can demonstrate on the street.
It was indeed a very stunning experience for people like me from a communist country.
My happiness in America lasted about 10 years, and then it gradually faded.
Not that I got tired of America, but as I stayed longer there, I get to know America more.
The more I know, the more I understand that the so-called "Freedom", "Democracy", "Human Rights" are mere slogans - as the government of the United States of America does not care one way or another about these things.
The people of America are great, though. But my American Dream was thoroughly disillusioned by the time of Desert Shield/Desert Storm.
By then, America was no longer practice the same thing it preached, and the American press was no longer upholding the same standard as their predecessors in the 1960's and 1970's.
I finally got out of America, back to Asia (but not back to China) in year 2003.
I've had enough of the hypocrisy.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !