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Lavabit.com Owner: 'I Could Be Arrested' For Resisting Surveillance Order
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.''"
"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
That's just being plain ignorant of history. At virtually no point in human history (including the US) was there a concept of privacy, openness or governmental transparency.
You may disagree with the reality of the world and wish for something different -- I'm sure most people do -- but pretending this is something new doesn't open the possibility of change because you're focusing on correcting a cause that doesn't actually exist.
Although, personally, I think its a whole lot less stressful to not worry about things that don't really impact me, always have been and always will be. On that note, I'm going to e-mail and call friends to arrange a barbecue because the weather is really quite spectacular today, and I don't give two shits what spooky government agency might be storing my call records or scanning those e-mails.