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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.
America used to be a free country and now where are we?
It was a myth, a good PR. The truth is probably the USA were never more, or less, democratic and free than most of western europe state. Just your run of the mill western democratic country. Not bad, but not the best either : just one among many good country to live in.
Welcome to 2013, the terrerists are still winning without having to lift a finger.
Apparently our freely-elected Constitutional government has succeeded in creating a critical mass of fear in the US. Real investigative journalism, what little there actually was, is now dead. We are therefore left with only state-approved information exchange.
Time for me to get my passport renewed and learn a new language. Fuck this country. I can get a job anywhere.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
you mean the ones who use 'Anonymous Coward' as their sig? (like you perhaps?)
I've disagreed with PJ over many things but I've always respected her argument and I've never been censored when I've put forward differing views to hers.
Her research into a topic is excellent and puts many lawyers to shame.
I for one will miss her and Groklaw.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
It sounds very melodramatic, but we really are heading towards the day when many of us are going to need to flee our own country. Those of us that have been free and open with out opinions, anyway.
Perhaps some good can come of this---harnessing the power of the authors of the constitution as they spin in their graves.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Terrorists (US Governmet) 10,000+
American Citizens : 0
\
Groklaw will be missed. You are, and will remain, a rock star. :)
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
All components required to impose totalitarian regime were in place for some time. Now, our lovely, corporate-sponsored fascist and criminal government decided to turn the key.
This is just the biggest bunch of BS. Email has never been secure or private, so why is everyone pretending that it is? The only thing Groklaw has to fear is not having a lame excuse for giving up, but now that they have one...
Holy shit ! .. What a totally unexpected ending. .. this is truly a shock and a terrible loss.
This is terrible. No words . I been following them since day 1
Here in the UK, the hpme office defended the police use of 'terror' laws against Greenwalds boyfriend, claiming it is to catch terrorists and critics should watch what they are 'condoning'.
'Condoning' is a legal word, 'condoning terrorism' is a crime, the Home Office is sending out a veiled threat with that word.
They don't win unless we've stopped fighting. And we're a long, long way from that.
Just get out of the USA. There's no such thing as freedom there anymore.
This is unprecedented that companies are folding in response to the abuses of the US government. It is not something to ignore and yet we still have anonymous cowards humping the legs of slashdot making sophomoric marginal comments. Keep up the good work AC. You truly are the lowest common denominator.
And I said nothing, because I am not a Lavabit user. Then they came for Groklaw, and I said nothing, because I don't visit Groklaw. Then they came for Slashdot, and I had one less platform to voice my outrage...
Never one comment i ever written was ever , and i know of noone that ever was censored. If you were post your writings here for us to judge if she was right. Maybe you're one of them assholes that can't write a phrase without insulting anyone ? Maybe you deserved it for being a ponpous ass and racist and made out of order comments that could get anyone in trouble with the law ? :D
Before blaming them , and by God did they ever do a fantastic job , give us proof . The balance of integrity and honor weighs highly in the Lady in a Red Dress's favour.
Groklaw has been an excellent source for legal information. PJ has always done an excellent job.
This is another marker on that downhill race to revolution. I just hope it's not as bloody as the last one.
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Groklaw was in the phase of closing a couple of years now - this "heroic exodus" claiming that trendy "i am a freedom fighter" is just too much drama for something no so dramatic...
What this translates to isn't that Groklaw doesn't like what's happening to others and is shutting down out of protest.
It is that it has been served with a demand for information/wire-tapping along with an attached gag order, courtesy of the 'Star Chamber'. The only 'legally' safe way for organisations to tell people that something like this has happened is to shut down their operations.
So, translation of Groklaw's announcement: the NSA/FBI/TLA have copied our hard drives and installed a data logger in our data centre. Oh yeah, and we're not allowed to talk about it.
The use of anonymous is handy for many of us whose employers have frowned on our participating in online forums. But certainly, anon is only slightly more anonymous than "RotateLeftByte." I'm not the person you responded to but I am a frequent user of anon and I find your comment pretty disrespectful.
I too, will miss PJ and Groklaw. I've participated in a number of discussions there, and always enjoyed reading it. I think she's gone a little over the top since Groklaw was all about the law and everything posted was pretty much public record.
If technocrats at Groklaw cannot use PGP than who is PGP for?
The hard part of finding people to prosecute is *finding* candidates. Once you know who one person is, you can do traffic analysis and find all their friends. See, for example http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/
If someone is reading all our (insecure) emails to and from a known "person of interest", such as, for example, a well-known web site, then they can build the kind of interconnection matrix that will lead them to the supporters and fellow-travellers of that website.
Were I a copyright maximalist, I would regard groklaw as a criminal conspiracy, and the centre of a matrix of criminals and fellow-travellers. Based on that, I'd then petition the communications security establishment for a (secret) order allowing me to identify the conspirators and their fellow-travellers for (equally secret) investigation, leading to either prosecution or private revenge...
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
It was THE most important legal website on the internet covering SCO , Apple/Samsung Microsoft/Novell etc etc
The level of analysis and documenta on the site made it a unique tool and place to get information on litigation between the tech giants.
This is where we followed the SCO owns Linux war against Novell et al . This is a terrible loss for all because the truth and documents was out there and we all participated and learned from it. It is a terrible loss for who are curious about their world and the workings of the legal system.
I am in shock. I went there and spent thousands of hours on the site. I learned and owe the Lady in a Red Dress one hell of a lot.
Thanks PJ . Forever in your debt.
Ric
As I'm sure you've found out, or have been told by others... Tor is not meant for privacy, it's meant for anonymity.
That being said, many of the Tor exit nodes are run by three-letter government agencies.
Nope, but 2+ years ago, she did say she would stop updating Groklaw with articles. Did she stick to that?
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110409161444432
I've followed Groklaw since the beginning, it was a brilliant site because of the dedication, insight and attention to detail brought to it by PJ and it is, needless to say, a tragedy that she is forced to take this action by the behaviour of the Government.
It's really a double tragedy because it's people like her whom we need more than ever right now. The US and other Governments are highly unlikely simply to stop this behaviour on their own, they will only do so if forced to do so by us, their citizens, and someone with the qualities and platform which PJ has could play a useful part in that ( not I think she should be forced to do this against her will and absolutely not that I'd hold anything against her if she doesn't want to do that )
Completely and utterly fucked. And they're dragging the rest of the world down to the worst level of pervasive state-security.
America has become everything they were against 30 years ago -- scared sheep with the government looking over your shoulder at everything you do.
You have no moral legitimacy, and you are no longer worthy of respect.
If stuff like this is happening, the US is going to devolve into a sad parody of herself. Because people are stopping believing even the illusion freedom. And in the process, you are making this happen in every other country.
Fuck you guys.
And #slashdot is not #twitter, you moron.
Seriously, enough with the hashtags already. Learn how to type proper messages!
And. Get. Off. My. Lawn!! ;-)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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)
Groklaw is one of the watchers watching the watchers!
Their articles expose the corporate corruption and report on the legal shenanigans by the likes of the RIAA, Apple, Microsoft, SCO, Sony, and even the federal government itself.
We need Groklaw now more than ever.
Doesn't that make them a terrorist organization worthy of detainment in gitmo?
Grow a fucking spine
As posted by AC. I think that may have detracted from your point somewhat.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
First they came for the whistleblowers,
But I was not a whistleblower.
Then they came for the journalists,
But I was not a journalist.
Then they came for the lawyers,
But I was not a lawyer.
Then they came for me,
And there was nobody left to defend me in court, write about my case or provide facts as to what had been done against all of us.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
We need education : if there's ways that we can do it , perhaps a good thing would be someone or a group starting a site that is dedicated to demistify the workings of encryption for the ordinary joe. because to anyone not technically inclined , and even myself , it's a bit of a mystery. If you got good tips and info on how to make encryption easy for the common folk , like how to use it with gmail or other services i am sure there's a bunch of readers that would go on the bandwagon.
Perhaps it IS time we grow pointy fur and needles. But we certainly need to make it easy because Auntie Laure can't understand the lingo.
Shame indeed.
She was a flood of sunshine on the dark underbelly of the legal world.
I believe it was Bob Dylan who came up with the words you need to hear right now: "Just because you like my stuff, doesn't mean I owe you anything."
You're free to disapprove of PJ's choice, of course, but can you do it without sounding quite so petulant and self-entitled?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Referees: Paid off by the feds and the megacorps;
Americans in penalty box because they dare to even try: Rising.
This makes the first poster likely to be just a troll or someone trying to spread lies.
Said by an Anonymous Coward. Proud. Strong. Standing up for himself.
hmm, do you live in a city? I have seen dogs bite a porcupine, in fact the same dog multiple porcupines, and our porcupines have barbed quills, unlike your friendly little hedgehogs. I don't think that was a very apt simile, even though the dog does whimper and yowl a lot while you pull the quills out of their nose with a pliers.
On the actual point of your post, exactly what pointy fur am I gonna grow? Exactly how does my using GPG do actual damage to the government dogs when they do bite me? The principle behind a hedgehog's defence is that it hurts the offender, how do I do that to the government? Are you advocating some kind of militant response?
The fact is that when we have to preemptively encrypt all our personal email because we know it is being intercepted, as opposed to sometimes encrypting sensitive emails in case it gets misdirected, then the mental/emotional damage PJ is talking about in TFA has already occurred. We have already been deprived of the concept of personal privacy, we are already in Auschwitz with Primo Levi.
Whether the government actually is intercepting all our email or not no longer matters. It is no longer just the preppers and the tinfoil hat types that see the NSA behind every door, it is now a significant percentage of the unwashed masses.
At this point what intelligent person would actually believe the government if the were to come clean, admit what they had done in the past and give us transparent oversight into what they are doing now?
Based on history most of us would immediately assume there is yet another three letter acronym behind the NSA, with even quieter black helicopters, that has been pulling the strings all along, and will continue to do so unseen by us.
It is much like what Asimov did with his foundation series after the first three, there is always a darker more hidden organization behind the ones we uncover, and they are always better manipulators than the ones before. We are just discovering psychohistory, but in reality a hidden group has been steering all of human civilization for thousands of years, and yeah, they are robots.
This rant went a little over the top, but I am thinking of all the stuff I did as a kid that my children will never be able to do, and it pisses me off.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
So basically you are the reason anonymous usage gets a hard time.
Perhaps you should be working rather than dicking around in online forums while you're working? Of course you find it disrespectful, you just got called out.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But I'm guessing it is not the technical privacy hurdles which have her against the ropes - it is the legal ones. If I make the most technically secure site in the world, but I am forced to secretly open the back door to some government official, secretly demanded under jackboot threat and penalty of imprisonment and the ruin of my life - what else do I do? If you are willing to let her destroy her life - why don't you offer to take over the administrative side of GROKLAW, rightfully refuse to comply and publish all the details, and we will all vocally support you as you are carted off to your new dungeon cell. It is her life, not just some abstract principled stand.
Coming out of voluntary retirement because you enjoy the work is a bit different from resigning because you think your work is impossible.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Groklaw was there when much we take for granted was under attack, and as a rallying point was hugely influential as vested interest after vested interest tried to enclose the commons and steal from the common wealth. It outlived SCO, it saw Linux grow and thrive, and we rejoiced as it called the odds and gathered forces against one carpet bagging IP troll after another.
It is truly heart breaking to see PJ shutting up shop, and I only hope it helps to focus us on a greater danger than SCO ever was.
Vale Groklaw.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.
This will not change until you strike the fear of god into every elected hack in Congress. I don't care if they personally feed Warren Buffet's money to starving babies -- let them know they are gone at the next election.
Yes, you sitting on your ass reading this.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
As somebody who is being stalked myself, I believe that the correct way to fight privacy invasion is to keep doing what you're doing, and show the invaders that they cannot intimidate you.
But I realize that this is a decision each person must make for him/herself, and I am sorry but not necessarily surprised that this is the decision PJ made.
I'm a Canadian and I'm confused.
As I see it, Americans take pride in individualism. If the U.S. government does too much, or gets too big, it's 'Socialism', or even worse 'Communism'.
The constitution, defends the right to bear arms, so don't even think about limiting rights to guns. The constitution is sacred...
If the government wants to monitor every thought in the country, even through it's unconstitutional, and it's secret...
go ahead...
I'm sure you have a good reason...
WHAT????
I DON'T GET IT.
Where's the individualism, where's the fight for the constitution, isn't the government too big....
What am I missing?
PJ stands for Pamela Jones. AFAIK, she is not a trans-gender individual.
The whole point of Groklaw is (or was) to present [para-]legal opinion and information in the open. It isn't a subversive organisation. Except, of course, in the sense that if you think for yourself, you're committing a subversive act.
If I may paraphrase Agent Smith here: "And tell me, _Mr._ Anderson, what good is a free speech ...if. you are unable to speak" - that is the situation we may find ourselves now. I think it is more perfect than catch 22. It does not matter that much if it is as Obama says the authority is not abused albeit one may doubt that as it is apparent gov officials lied in front of congress because the law allowed them and actually forced them too. The resulting situation is that we will most likely never know. The law is on their side. I think that is what grounding fathers wanted to avoid I suppose: absolute power in hands of the executive branch.How long this will be misused in a serious way? Is there a guarantee that absolute surveillance will not turn into absolute oppression. In the name of our security and human rights of course. I always knew that the western world we live in is only superficially different from communist one in which I grew up. Back then they just did not have the means to supervise everybody all t he time, they still tried and failed. Now there are technological means to achieve exactly that and the really bad thing is that judging on the general public behaviour in US and other western countries, there is not much we can expect in terms of reestablishing privacy. There is a drive towards security of communication in Germany right now but I do not see how this is going to be of any relevance when everybody is ready to sell its dearest private info to FB etc.
has somebody grabbed a copy of the files/posts and saved it somewhere safe(ish)??
please note the NSA is NOT a safe place
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Quitting now just makes it easier. Clog up the cloud. Do it with purpose and deliberation. Don't quit. Never surrender.
Why cant they just have their own comment page? I think they already have one, so why is SMTP vital?
Email doesn't work, try something else, perhaps TOR.
tor won/t help when there's a data logger installed by nsa at the destination. And I don't think much else will help either.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
You do not know and maybe we will never know either - maybe the law is now secretly changed so that even a vague comment on the subject of government interference is illegal so now we can only assume that any closing of business may have something to do with gov albeit in majority of cases it would not. Assuming that black helicopters arrived the only way to protect the privacy of users is to destroy the data on drives and fast. To do it in a way that does not violate law (you may be destroying evidence etc) is not easy. It is sometimes better to shut down and move elsewhere, start anew with better protections (if possible) etc.
Yeah, that sucks. Well, a paper envelope and a stamp still works.
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-- James Madison (4th US President)
Why shut it down? If she can't do groklaw without input then just take input by good old letter mail. Sure it's harder. But as the old saying goes.. Nothing good comes easy.
I supposes a case could be made for the government reading letter mail as well but getting into a sealed envelope undetected is much harder (and far less efficient) than just slurping up all electronic communication.
This all seems like such a bad dream. Unfortunately, that makes the American predicament no less real. We may soon find ourselves facing three choices:
1. Passively watch our experiment in democracy lay down and die, while accepting that 2 + 2 = 5. Hopefully your children won't be too dissatisfied with your parenting. They might turn you in under the guise of suspicion of thinking freely.
2. Flee the country. Get you're passport and leave now while you still can. We may find some of the more desirable countries banning the immigration of fleeing US citizens, or at the very least face widespread discrimination abroad.
3. Fight back - I'm talking violence here.
I know how melodramatic that all sounds, and a few years ago I would have never imagined myself realistically making such a statement - not in a million years.
I can't believe I have a front row seat to everything that's going down. Maybe someday I'll find myself telling someone where I was when the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights were permanently suspended. Maybe someday I'll tell someone how the entirety of US history really went down from founding ideals to however this ends - I'm sure it will be nothing even remotely close to their heavily censored, revisionist textbook.
Last but not least: this really sucks.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Or have they already got to you?
Blink twice for yes.
You are jumping away from the issue: The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt, in a way that affects everyone on the planet.
If the communication was directed to a lawyer at the site, would client attorney privilege not be a valid shield? I think it takes more than your average order to break that.
I read the statement, and I can't figure out why Groklaw is shutting down.
Discourse about FOSS should not have to be encrypted. And should you desire it to be truly private... encrypt it yourself.
This is stupid.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
She'll always be remembered for the SCO battle. This doesn't mean that she needs to go on and fight this fight also. I wish she'd handed off the site to someone else rather than lock the doors but that's her decision.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
The fact that there's apparently widespread acceptance of the notion that 'all means possible' to prevent another terrorism event is better than the scary notion of bad people blowing things up.
In reality, it means that everyone has mostly decided they'll give up their privacy, their ability to move around the country, and accept government intrusion in their lives -- all in the name of keeping the bogeyman at bay.
When the towers fell, the collective psyche of America was pretty much shattered -- and they haven't been the same since, and never will be. The America which existed in the first half of 2001 will never exist again.
This even caused most of America to decide all of those things in the Constitution aren't important if there's a chance of getting blown up.
As a country, they've abandoned any of the moral authority and idealism the Constitution represented. And now, America is a bunch of scared, whiny bitches cowering in the dark, and grateful for their government which looks at everything they do.
America has abandoned her founding principles, and the world is a worse place for it.
I'm really wondering why not to circumvent this in some way. Say moving Groklaw to a country that is "out of reach" for the US government (not sure if there's one).
A more general question is what are a viable alternatives to e-mail. Everyone talks about how it's impossible to keep privacy with current email, because even if you encrypt the payload the headers are still plaintext, but I haven't seen anything solving this issue so far. It shouldn't be that hard, I guess - after all the headers don't really matter to the MTAs, except for the "to" so moving them to encrypted payload should not be a big issue (but maybe I'm naive).
While I respect PJ and all she has done to bring light on the many legal issues of interest to /. and other internet users, I do not understand this decision. She seems to be implying that she fears that one day, maybe, she'll be forced to turn over a private e-mail, perhaps even an encrypted one and links that to the current NSA revelations. But that is a red herring - Groklaw has always been subject to subpoena for documents related to a criminal or even civil litigation. And anyone sending information to PJ knows the inherent security risks - PJ has no obligation to provide complete security, something that is impossible or at least nearly so. To the extent that PJ feels the current environment will discourage sources of information or her consultations with associaties, as others have pointed out, use strong encryption. Doing so will eliminate much of the creeped out feel she says she has about the possibility of emails to/from her being read by the government(s).
I don't know but I just feel a bit like PJ is being a drama queen on this one. Yes, there are concerns and nobody should be happy about the wholesale spying that is going on. But shutting down is going a bit over the deep end and I think sends the wrong message.
But not your last breath eh.
seriously if I'd spent 10 years running groklaw i think i might fake a suicide to get out of it. PJ must feel several pounds lighter having shed that burden.
She did a great job now maybe she can have her life back.
seriously good job with the sco fight thanks pj
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Then you do it....you shallow selfish brat..... Putting aside all delusions, we all have to live in some respect a "normal" life. It's rather impossible when you put yourself out there over the lenght of ten freaking years. My take is she will be back when she finds the "new medium". What's really pathetic is a "Heroine" being crapped on because she needs a break.
End of Line.
The problem is, these gag orders need to be challenged in court. I don't blame anyone for not wanting to take on that fight but *somebody* has to or it will simply stand.
(For all I know, they have been already and found "lawful" in which case, we truly do have problems)
Why is it okay for the government to spy on people? We all know it's wrong. Anyone who looks in someone else's journal or thumbs through another persons email -- knows that they are doing something wrong. Is it really to keep me safe? No thanks. I thought that we the land of the free -- not the land of the safe. The ends do not justify the means, my friends.
Besides, I cannot see how we are safer because we spy on people. How can anyone trust our government? Why would people want to do business with us? We jeopardize our morals, our integrity and our reputation. If anything, it's that behavior that makes us untrusted and ultimately targets. It also seems like a huge waste of money. I can think of plenty of other good uses for our tax dollars -- why are we paying the government to spy on us?
I live in the state of Maryland -- we have a large NSA installation.
I've been thinking about going to my local representative to try to get support for the following Bill:
1.It should be illegal to spy on people, within the state of Maryland.
2.It should be illegal to use any public (local, state, or federal) funds for the purposes of spying on people, within the State of Maryland.
3.The only exception to this can be made on a specific case by case, individual basis, by a Judge of a public (non-secret) court, in the correct local jurisdiction (hopefully Maryland) for the specific individual that is involved.
BTW -- Where the heck did these secret courts come from? What's wrong with our normal judicial system? It seems to me that most of the really terrible things that people do -- are done in secret. If you are going to wield the power to take our freedoms away -- at least maintain some transparency.
Allow me to present two quotes I think are relevant. The first is from the the Groklaw article referenced to in TFS.
Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That's not the rule of law as I understood the term.
The second is from a recent op ed piece from Charles Krauhammer. I usually disagree with him on just about everything, but I read his stuff anyway just to get a glimpse of the what the "other side" is thinking. Nevertheless, I think he is spot on with the following:
Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers. And most consequentially, it introduces a fatal instability into law itself. If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what's left of the law?
So I thought: well time to delete my slashdot account, I don't need anyone tracing certain posts back to my email account, but guess what? Slashdot doesn't allow deletion of account! That's more of a reason than ever to want to delete it IMHO.
They've done a lot of good in the short time they've been around. I know I've learned a few things from reading that site I never would've cared about otherwise.
Sad to see that it came to this, but going up against a regime of terror like the US government would be out of Groklaw's league. At least we already have the EFF on that.
I'm growing concerned about the future of the open internet, but as long as we're all still here: it's been an honour to share this weird corner of it with Groklaw (and the rest of you oddballs) for the past decade.
I Agree, a big thanks goes out to PJ and all the others who made Groklaw what it was. Obviously this is not the America I learned about in grade school. Sigh.
All emails should be encrypted pont-to-point anyway. This has pretty much been true since day 2 of the SMTP protocol and probably true back through UUCP. There is no reason why not, the big email clients (Outlook and Thuderbird) have all the necessary bits and pieces built-in. It should have been made an obvious option over a number of years and then switched to the default a long time ago. Even before all this NSA nonsense, the geek mail admin down the hall has typically been able to read a huge amount of private and sensitive material and that is just stupid. Trust is one thing but why put information in the hands of anyone who does not need access?
Heck, it might even have cut down on some of the hideous spam explosion we've seen.
Arguably it might have made the spam worse, of course.
They don't win unless we've stopped fighting. And we're a long, long way from that.
Yeah, no one starting to fight is about as far from "stopping" fighting as you can get.
Well, there's Snowden, Lavabit, and PJ. But 99.997% of us are snacking on Doritos and watching the news like it's a sports channel.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Although I think this is a slight over-reaction to how government security monitoring actually affects Groklaw itself, as a statement of objection against the security apparatus monitoring the internet in general, it is entirely valid. We in the US (and UK) who truly value freedom are slowly being reduced to the behaviors of cold-war Soviet dissidents, forced to smuggle our communications around by hand, to a limited number of people we know and trust personally.
We are the 198 proof..
I've always assumed we have no privacy on the Internet ..
AccountKiller
They don't win unless we've stopped fighting. And we're a long, long way from that.
The problem is that by the time the people START fighting, the war will be over.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Not a good place to do business.
But here is the horrible thing: even if /. has received a National Security Letter... They can't tell you.
Nope. But they can shut down abruptly, like Groklaw and Lavabit did. And they can put up a shutdown notice like Groklaw did, mentioning Lavabit like Groklaw did, and "inexplicably" lock out comments like Groklaw did. Hell, they could put up a page with nothing but a link to the Groklaw message.
I bet a LOT of people would be freaked and outraged by such an event.
I'm kinda hoping it turns into a whole chain of sites abruptly shutting down like Lavabit did. It might stir up a large part of the population if a lot of websites started shutting down in that manner. Hell, imagine the fallout if something like Wikipedia were to suddenly shut down with no explanation beyond a message like the one currently sitting on Groklaw. A message decrying government intrusion and total loss of privacy, and directly mentioning Lavabit. Hundreds of reporters asking why.... and the only answer fro the Wikimedia foundation is "Under advice of our lawyers we are unable to answer that question", and just directing the reporters back to the shutdown message.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Her exposure of the legal shenanigans pulled off by megacorps pissed off the powers that be and they sent the spooks after her.
Groklaw was a blast of cleansing sunshine against the undead of Sony, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, and the like. They were allies of the EFF.
Nope. But they can shut down abruptly, like Groklaw and Lavabit did.
No, they are part of a much larger conglomerate. Said conglomerate may choose to cooperate with NSA/TLA agency, and choose not to divulge the fact to their users. (This being said, Slashdot has had problems of that nature before, although much less dire). The only solution would then be for the Slashdot crew to take the high road and resign "en masse", while publicly stating why as the Lavabit founder did.
I bet a LOT of people would be freaked and outraged by such an event.
I am not so sure of that, unfortunately. (sigh)
Hell, imagine the fallout if something like Wikipedia were to suddenly shut down with no explanation beyond a message like the one currently sitting on Groklaw.
Been there, done that. Maybe that is what is needed: worldwide protest against the NSA? Black pages everywhere? Again, I am not sure that this would change anything, but one can dream.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The problem is that the people that are defending gun rights are by and large not technical people. They get there news from the local paper of which they only read the sports section and local news, and get national stat and international new from the tv. But the tv is now not reporting the important news about our right being violated on a unprecedented scale they are talking about Hillery election bid for 16, the Kardasians latest divorce, what politician with an ironic name took pictures of his pecker or what athlete got caught eating 'roids by the fist full.
out of sight out of mind.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking teabaggers
FTFY, if you're going to drag that old chestnut out of its well earned retirement at least get it right!
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
The US government has been out of control, corrupt, ignoring constitution and law, and in the pockets of power and money grubbing interests before PJ was born.
I'm glad in the past year so many people have finally started to get it, though.
> they will definitely not waste that secret for the "benefit" of some petty legal crapola.... military purposes...
Yes, and I certainly hope that things haven't gotten bad enough yet that the following would be relevant, but they don't have to waste the secret to leverage it. Certainly if *enough* people who might have effectively led the resistance have tragic accidents early in their rise then folks are going to get suspicious and shift to better cryptography, but where is that line?
At any rate it's definitely worth advocating that everyone encrypt at least as much traffic as conveniently possible - worst case scenario we've at least drastically increased the amount of processing power necessary to scrape the data, and they'll be cautious with how they use it to avoid tipping their hand. Best case it's actually secure and the resistance only needs to worry about all the traditional methods used to infiltrate the opposition.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you were going to move your high-profile website that deals with controversies concerning personal privacy and liberties to a darknet, would you advertise that fact? What communication would you issue?
I would suggest the communication you would issue would look very like PJ's.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
In the early 90s, I used to read the cypherpunks email list. During the PGP, Clipper chip, etc. drama, the cypherpunks were discussing practical ways of encryption. They wrote code and collected practical how-to guides on encryption. Lots of good stuff - how to automate encryption on your email, how to make an encrypted "cryptobook" laptop, etc. And no one used it. Today encryption is used only for shopping. When's the last time you got an encrypted email? It isn't for lack of technology.
Advice: on VPS providers
Does anyone else think twice before posting? Why it is always good to think about what you are saying or typing, have you ever thought no I don't want to be associated with this issue. When you have to think of "legal issues" regarding a troll message, intended to troll specifically something is changing.
Yeah I almost clicked the Post Anonymously box.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The *problem* is that courts of have ruled these gag orders *cannot* be challenged in court.
PJ has supplied the analogy already, to explain her mistake. I don't even need to make anything up:
In other words, lots of people knew about the risk all along, but someone didn't and got burned as a result. (That sucks. I sympathize.) When that person finally realized how hostile the environment was, and had always been, and what countermeasures that person should have always been using, what happened?
PJ, did you take the burglary as a lesson to move away from NYC and also infer that all rational people should also move away from NYC?
Or did you learn to secure your windows, see fire escapes as possible attack surfaces, etc?
What the government is doing is sucks, and every person in Congress and the White House ought to be issuing press releases that they are going to make the gag orders illegal (so that violating the illegal gags has no negative legal consequence to the speaker). They should say they're going to put an end to the US government working against the interest of US citizens. And every American who would even consider voting for someone who isn't issuing such a press release, ought to be ashamed. And yet, ALL THIS IS A SEPERATE ISSUE. When it comes to privacy, your government is always a potential problem, but it's never your only problem. So no matter what happens to this country, your problem remains and even if you had a big enough gun, you can't solve the privacy problem by pointing your gun at your government's face.
Just like how moving away from NYC, doesn't mean you never have to worry about another burglary.
In 1991, PRZ released the first version of PGP. Why do you think he did that? We have known literally for decades that lots of people are able to read our unencrypted email. I just don't understand how this basic and obvious fact is still wished away. Nothing Bushbama did, changed that. Nothing the NSA has done, changed that. The PATRIOT Act didn't change it, CALEA didn't change it, and future CALEA expansion isn't going to change it. On September 10th 2001, you could have just as easily and accurately written about unencrypted email,
and it would be no less relevant or true than it is today. And similarly, when I see
I have to call bullshit. You "don't expect" it, in the sense that you think it's undesireable that it happens, and you wish your plaintext communication could be private. But seriously, for decades you certainly have "expected" it in the sense that you predict it and have had reason to think it could happen, committed by any of many parties including the government, and that it can be done passively and inexpensively, without anyone ever detecting it and being held accountable. Your love letters were always on the wind.
The environment didn't change, PJ. You did. The world is no darker now than it was when you launched groklaw. If anything, things are better. You went from not giving a fuck if people read your email, or maybe from living in denial of what every single Internet tech-minded person eventually realizes, to understanding how vulnerable unsecured communications are, and caring about it.
That's good! It's pro
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The principles that underly the actual USA, specifically the constitution (as written, not as "interpreted"), are the foremost in the world by quite a distance -- they do the best job of balancing individual rights without falling overboard and choking off individual freedoms. Not perfect (oh, would I love to rewrite some of it), but still the best to date. Comparable efforts make serious mistakes, particularly in the areas of suppressing speech and giving cover to superstition. The ideal here in the USA was a profoundly well thought out constitutional republic, given the time frame the ideas were laid out in.
However, those principles are now only a vague memory in the actual day to day operation of the US legal and social systems. So while one might admire the foundation, the intent, and even the attempts of many individuals within the context of what one could simply call 'The USA", it's a huge mistake to take those high points as a legitimate description of who and what we are today: A corporate oligarchy, wildly out of the citizen's control, engaged in wholesale deception to keep it that way. Today, we have embraced some of the most repulsive things we used to say we stood against. From torture to surveillance to pervasive, systemized political corruption to massive, for-profit imprisonment, the USA at this time is no more than a caricature of its founding ideals.
Speaking to the younger generation (yeah, I'm getting old, and this is my lawn), I'm sorry, very sorry in fact, but you're well and truly fucked.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The question is, where to go? At this rate we'll probably you'd probably need to flee the damn planet to find any real freedom/liberty.
No.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
FFS. The USA was designed as a constitutional republic. Not a democracy. Which is the only reason we ever had a chance. A democracy is one of the most failure-prone systems out there; majority rule is two retarded wolves and an intelligent sheep voting on what's for dinner. And no, choosing representatives doesn't make a society a democracy any more than choosing a dictator does.
Other than that, yes. Great intentions, just as you say; yet these have resolved today in an almost complete and total failure to hit those lofty mark(s.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"And should you desire it to be truly private... encrypt it yourself."
Which does absolutely nothing against 'metadata' snooping. Nice non-solution.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Education and Communication are key to the future, and Groklaw did everything possible in that regard.
If only other websites were like Groklaw, how much more that humankind could accomplish.
The Future may be a mess, but Groklaw has accomplished much in preparation for the journey.
Godspeed PJ!
Godspeed to everyone!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Yep, these criminals have the full force of the government behind them!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
This may have been the only way to defend everyone who sent her email about issues they were involved in. There's no defense against a secret order issued from a secret court, tied with a secret gag order, and she may have known more than you do about her operations and who she communicated with via Lavabit.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
So who will the next victims be of the NSA dragnets? Truecrypt? Or will all forms of encryption be banned unless they apply a universal backdoor for government use?
It is important to understand the full implications of such government actions and where they will ultimately lead us. This surveillance is essentially Panopticon, and it is not some "misguided attempt at a good deed" (i.e., fighting terrorism). The men responsible for this want power. Totalitarians require the ability to censor all narratives but those they propagate, and if left unchecked, they will destroy the most innovative medium of knowledge exchange the world has ever known. Lavabit and Groklaw are just the beginning.
Some historians mark the destruction of the Library of Alexandria as the symbolic turning point that drove the West downward into a millenium of superstition and darkness. The Internet is the Great Library of the modern age. I wonder if, a thousand years from now, some new civilization -- having pulled itself out of the muck and disease of a second Dark Age -- will look back and wonder why we did nothing to stop these madmen.
We are literally experiencing our own Iron Curtain descend upon everything we hold dear and at one time self-evident.
The problem is the vast majority. Some are too damn busy just trying to survive in an economic butality more in keeping with their great-grandparents than their boomer 'rents. Some are deep-down terrified of speaking out, choosing to cower in their apartments ala Network.
But a depressingly large chunk are willingly making that trade of freedom for supposed security. I'll warrant that chunk mostly reads as Caucasian, suburban, and well-to-do.
Keep in mind even now, there are Russians who whistfully sigh for the heyday of the Soviet Union.
If you want to prevent the NSA from snooping communications, come up with better protocols.
I don't know why we don't just post a public key URL in the DNS records, and when making a request over this HTTPS-NEW connection you provide a public key as the first MIME part. Then you can have secure communications.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
And #slashdot is not #twitter, you moron.
Seriously, enough with the hashtags already. Learn how to type proper messages!
And. Get. Off. My. Lawn!! ;-)
Actually, you can post to Slashdot via Twitter now.
You'll see the bird icon when it happens.
In Soviet America the NSA emails you.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
People are amazingly bad at understanding risks: In the U.S., for example... http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-killed-police-officer-terrorist
davecb@spamcop.net
Well, they CAN tell you. But they will suffer the severe consequences of doing so. Very few people are willing to make that sacrifice. Being outside of the Matrix is not a safe or cozy place to be. Most people would rather enjoy their fake freedom, which looks a bit like real freedom, and enjoy the pleasures of life unbound by a small prison cell. Can't really blame them for that, but when you take these decisions in aggregate, we can start to see how quickly a moderately-free society can devolve into a police state.
How do you implement an exchange of encryption keys that is
a) convenient for the users and
b) resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks? Attempts by the NSA to install those at your ISP can be expected.
Sincere question, as I'm not an expert on the subject. But I believe both a) and b) need to be solved to gain widespread acceptance for the new protocol.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Very doubtful. Groklaw doesn't represent sensitive communications on the scale that the NSA or CIA would care about. PJ is delusional if she really thinks anyone in the government gives a damn about her site and the emails between her and her collaborators.
Delusional, eh? Well, maybe. The problem is that this is exactly the kind of thing that was said about the people ranting about massive government surveillance and secret NSA rooms at the telcos. It sounded paranoid, sure, such things were unthinkable in a free country like the US. Well, think again. After all the revelations of the past few years, I for one am not prepared to state categorically that the government isn't specifically interested in the communications of Groklaw's contributors. Frankly, it's scary that it's gotten to the point where you can't dismiss such claims out of hand, but it is what it is. Putting one's head in the sand and pretending such things could never happen here is no longer a viable option.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't thread hijack so blatantly, but with over 600 comments, I don't think this'll get the attention it deserves otherwise.
Guys, in the 90s, a man named Philip Zimmerman foresaw the ease of which e-mail could be snooped on and the implications this would mean in the future and created PGP, a public-key encryption scheme designed to thwart such dragnets. There are open and free alternatives available, and public key cryptography is a mature and well-studied technology.
If you are concerned about your privacy, you need to start using encrypted e-mail and encouraging others to do the same for all communications. AES-256 and other algorithms also exist and can provide secure communications for everything from text messaging to full drive encryption.
You may recall that back in the 80s when RSA started releasing commercial-grade cryptographic solutions, the NSA was all over that. Many attempts to restrict PGP also occurred, resulting in MIT Press and others printing out the source code for distribution worldwide, as cryptography was classified as 'munitions'.
We've had the technology to stop the NSA's surveillance for over twenty years -- and instead of moving forward to address the threat that this, and other surveillance organizations worldwide pose not just to our own liberties and freedom, but also our economy and national security, we've sat on our asses and let corporations and governments slowly grow their surveillance to the point that they can't construct data centers fast enough to log our communications.
Everyone blames the NSA for these shut downs... but I blame you. Yes, YOU. You could be using secure e-mail today. It's not difficult. Hundreds of e-mail clients support this. Wikileaks proved we can securely exchange highly sensitive information using cryptography worldwide, and improves not just your own personal security, but that of the country you reside in, wherever you are.
Widespread use of cryptography is the single most important thing for us as a community of technology professionals to accomplish over the next decade. We've proven time and time again that it is trivial to do what the NSA is doing now -- anyone with a few grand, a fake ID card, and a pair of khakis can accomplish much the same. People are upset the NSA is spying on us.. but nobody considers that it's not just the NSA -- anyone who has spent more than a few grand on their car also has the same financial capability to spy on you. Not to the same degree, or with the same aim, but the technology itself is cheap. Dirt cheap.
The solution is even cheaper. Encrypt everything. Do it now. You have no excuse, and the threats in the world today can no longer be ignored. Do it for the NSA. Do it for the Russian hackers. Do it for the Indian malware authors. Do it for the guy across the street stealing your wifi. Do it because every tech professional is telling you to... because this is an easy problem to solve.
The internet is not safe anymore. Deal with it. Educate yourself.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I have been reading Groklaw since its inception in May 2003 and I am fully convinced (i) that there is a lady XY that goes by the name of Pamela Jones or just pj; (ii) that she did an epochal job; and (iii) that I and everybody else own her big thanks.
However, Groklaw changed after the lady disappeared for a couple of months in 2009 and then returned without much explanations. I had the distinct impression that a small team was then at work of which she was still the leader and the main contributor. A law professor took over for a brief period and disappeared again.
The team have now discovered that they cannot hide the way they thought they could and wished they could. The reasons given by pj for closing down are totally unconvincing. Does she communicate day by day? Does she use the phone? Does she write letters? With the same logic she is offering for Groklaw's closure she would have to stop talking, phoning and writing. And breathing.
What would a national security letter to slashdot ask for? Is there anything here that is kept private and secret?
So what's the sentiment around using GPG/PGP for email ?
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
The NSA and the security apparatchiks have the worst case of mission creep since Hitler took over the German Workers' Party in Bavaria.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
Well, why don't we just block all government IP addresses from our websites? If the government users want content they can get it from the NSA.
You chummers know what I mean. When corruption and corporate rule have crushed the future, the only real option is Shadowrunning.
The same things a national security letter could, and almost certainly did, demand from Groklaw.
(A) All emails
(B) All account information for every account
(C) IP-addresses and any other data on hand that can be used to track ever Slashdot user
(D) to install a surveillance box on the network to scan and log every packet of everyone who views Slashdot (regardless of whether they post)
The would probably also demand (E) to copy the entire database of all posts by every user and all other publicly available information. Category E is stuff anyone can get merely by scanning the site over the internet, but doubtless they'd take it because they can and because it saves them a lot of work trying to crawl the entire website themselves.
And based on what happened with TOR recently, and based on the available information on the Lavabit situation, it seems very possible the government has moved beyond "passive listening" and has moved into the realm of forcing active code onto websites to attack/subvert visitors' machines. As I understand it, Lavabit was set up in such a way that the Lavabit servers literally didn't have access to the information the government would need to access the mails... that the only way the government could obtain useful information would be to hijack the Lavasoft servers and use them to actively extract the required information from visitors.
Note that the government has already beenhacking into cellphones and car ONSTAR type systems to turn on the microphones an use them as "roving wiretaps". Those aren't even National Security Letter level stuff, those are court cases of regular law enforcement doing it.
So yeah, no big shocker if they're demanding websites host attack code to trace people who's true IP address is hidden behind TOR or a proxy or otherwise hard to trace.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You are jumping away from the issue: The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt, in a way that affects everyone on the planet.
If the U.S. government were extremely corrupt, we wouldn't be affecting everyone on the planet. We wouldn't affect much of anyone, other than to make our own citizens miserable. If we were corrupt, we wouldn't be trusted:
*as a trading partner
*as the world reserve currency
*for financial markets transactions
*for guidance and assistance in any sort of research or development, humanitarian aid, public health
and much more. The fact that we are NOT extremely corrupt, but are moving steadily in that direction, is what is so destabilizing. Trust, and consistency is vital.
tempus fugit
EVERYONE should use "Anonymous Coward," for all but the most innocuous postings. It's just common sense. The only argument against doing so is that it might provide a false sense of security if a poster doesn't realize that not revealing some dopey screen name increases his online security from, say, a 2.5 to a 2.9. Still, that 0.4 is better than nothing. The First Amendment has long protected one's right to speak anonymously, noting that requiring, or even an expectation of, identifying a source of controversial speech, can have a chilling effect. It may not be macho to post anonymously, but it's smart and at least nominally effective.
The simple truth is that we are and have always been corrupt. The difference is that now everyone knows about it. For examples see the Grant Administration. The building of the Panama Canal. Cuba pre Castro Or the recent Supreme Court rulings. Or lobbyists. Or the period of 1865 and after. Not that it was better before that I just don't know as much regarding that time period. We have made attempts to clean up but never seem to address the real issues which are inherent in the style of government we use (Republic). I can vote but our two party system is a mess. Look at the VA governor's race. A corrupt radical nut job or a career politician who is corrupt as hell. No other choice. Unless we fire the lot of them and start over, oh and get control of the damned debt we are screwed.
Groklaw was the IP world's equivalent of the Glenn Beck show. It was a venue for people with strong opinions who had no idea what they were talking about to debate subtle legal issues that were way over their heads. The dark underbelly of an enabling technology. It never changed anything meaningful in any meaningful way and was generally considered noise by anyone with a nontrivial knowledge of U.S. intellectual property law. The reasons for its closure sound like pure BS, something along the lines of: "I've been advised that one should never send any important information via email and since Groklaw can't survive without email, I need to shut it down." What, huh, really?? More likely, Ms. Groklaw just got tired of having to face dopey-but-heated I-ANAL debates all day every day and was too lazy to even spend the time to come up with a rationalization that made sense. So good friggin' riddance. The Internet's aggregate IQ just went up. If you're really interested in intelligent discussions of intellectual-property issues, it's not hard to Google a better-informed IP law blog that is entertaining and that attracts posters who, regardless of whether they're experts in the field, at least have a clue. Patently-O, for example, has its moments. And if losing this silly site breaks you up too much, Glenn Beck can always help you get your fill of start-with-a-conclusion-and-then-cherry-pick-facts-to-support-it debates. I-ANAL, indeed.
Maybe things were getting too hot for her anyway? Maybe she just needs a long vacation.
Why not just hand the site over to a worthy successor rather than shut down?
Is it just hot flashes? (cackles, runs away)
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Pretty good eh?
I mean they need to be ignored. Which will lead to the arrest and trial of those breaking them and then a run up the appeals process. Very messy and unpleasant.
> or should be - "the best" for some reason
Most nations came to be as ethnic or sometimes religious groups developed fixed borders. One big group just had different ancestors than another. No real national purpose, just their group has always been seperate from our group.
After Europeans fled to America to escape abusive monarchs and religious persecution, the founding fathers declared the US would become a seperate nation FOR THE PURPOSE OF democratic self-government by a free people. The nation was started BECAUSE the English king was violating their rights, so they set out to form a new republic dedicated to the protection of freedom and liberty.
That the US has failed so much in this IS special because we've failed in our purpose. The UK has SUBJECTS, the US is supposed to have citizens. It's somewhat expected for the crown to surveil it's subjects. The US Constitution says that shall not happen here. So it IS "supposed to be" special in that way - that our supreme law says our government cannot do what other governments do.
Obviously in many ways we've failed to be the special country we were intended to be.