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Joining Lavabit Et Al, Groklaw Shuts Down Because of NSA Dragnet
An anonymous reader was the first to write with news that Groklaw is shutting down: "There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the U.S. out or to the U.S. in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel. So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." Why it's a big deal.
The only people I ever see acting like their country is "the best" overall are Americans. A country can be "best" in certain areas, but I don't really see any one country as being "the best" overall. I was brought up in Scotland, and I think I'll continue to live here because 1) It's pretty and temperate, 2) Australia has too many deadly creepy crawlies, 3) the US is too smug.
which is totally what she said
But here is the horrible thing: even if /. has received a National Security Letter... They can't tell you.
Think about this for just a second. They. Cannot. Tell. You.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
You are much more free than before. Because you know more.
What you see is a forward movement.
Did you expect the power to just surrender to a future where they don't matter anymore?
As you know more and more. As you recover what is rightly yours. As you take over the control of your own country. They will fight back. And they will bite and tear down your houses searching for traitors. And they will destroy you, and put you in jails, and kill many of you.
But you will prevail.
Because freedom only moves one way.
You're scared because you're the first ones. There's only darkness ahead. But you shouldn't be, because behind that darkness is the future that will look back and cheer at you as the freedom fighters of this century.
It won't. Not until there is a war. And nobody wants a war.
You must either be very young, or be living in a barrel.
It has been mentioned by observers outside the US, often enough to become a truism, that America is incapable of functioning without a war, whether declared or not. And history certainly shows that your illustrious leaders like nothing better than to start a nice shiny new war when the cracks in their domestic policy need papering over.
Funny when I was growing up in the old Soviet Union, we were told day in and day out that Soviet Union is the best, and the Soviet People are the greatest, and the greatest brother among them was the (ethnic) Russian people. And that we were more free than anyone else, richer than anyone else, and more fair than anyone else. Oh, and that the average boys and girls in America live on the streets and governed by the evil tzar whose name is Reagan and who can not sleep at night tossing and turning just trying to think of the new ways to kill innocent Soviet children...
The stunning abruptness of the shutdown and the discussion of Lavabit screams at me that she was hit with an NSA letter. There's no way PJ would yank the plug without warning like that on some whim. Even comments were disabled. If PJ simply wanted to retire the project she would have wound things down gracefully. She would have encouraged the community to stay active. She would have given the community time to look for alternatives. She would have encouraged someone else to take up the job running a successor site.
I saw nothing in her post that I would call "false information". If she got an NSA letter and didn't mention it, that does not make any of what she wrote untrue. If PJ got an NSA letter with a legal gag order, she would obey it to the letter. But that can't stop her from shutting down the site to refuse to participate, and she knows the community is smart enough to see how utterly out of character such an abrupt shutdown is.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The US government has been corrupt for a long time. The difference now is that Manning and Snowden have basically pulled back the veil of secrecy enough to see that the Wonderful Wizard is nothing more than a crotchety old man. Not even a nice one at that. We have been on a slide since the 1950s. The only way we came to prominence is that the rest of the world leveled itself and somehow, sans Pearl Harbor, we remained untouched. What do you get when you have only one functioning economy in the world? Hello new World Power. The Soviets worked hard to bring themselves backup up to speed and quickly became the second Super Power. The Soviets had a shoddy structure though and fell to pieces because of that. Because of this, the US has lost it's primary enemy and looks around the world for others. Compare the US to Rome, and the history lines up so perfectly it's scary. Look at how the past two presidents tried to take power away from the senate. Look at how we spend more money on entertainment than we do on science or any other industry that will advance us. Look at the type of entertainment we have today where what we watch has little relevance tomorrow rather than something we will watch and cherish years or centuries from now. We are in the bread and circuses phase of the empire. Everyone is poor, but continue to be entertained, so they don't care. Religion is continuing to come into prominence again as it did in the the fall of the Roman empire. The rest of the world is advancing and our ideas are quickly becoming outdated. Our influence on the world is waning and we have very little to show for it. Other than a flag on the moon marking one of our pinnacle moments of advancement.
Place something witty here
For practical purposes, most western countries have strict privacy laws. They also have a healthy fear of secret courts and secret police.
While there are some three-letter agencies in Europe, their scope and reach is substantially limited.
It's always worth pointing out that the US (having less than 5% of the world's population) houses over 30% of the world's prisioners and takes people's freedom at a rate nearly double Russia and China and 10-16 times that of most of Europe.
Despite a similar framework of laws, this particular obsession, itself, belies a pretty specific and astounding obsession with authority and police that is unique among the world (except, maybe, in China).
This is also one of the myriad reasons I left the US for good several years ago. Good riddance.