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Comment by beeboop | Hacker News Reader

Restrictions on speech, specifically with NSLs, can happen to only a few people but still be extremely significant. The example of the Lavabit email hosting service comes to mind. He was served with an NSL requiring him to nefariously gather the private encrypted emails of his users. He was a single person with an extremely important thing to say with drastic implications, but was legally barred from doing so. I would call that significant. Multiply times thousands of people and you have thousands of very important things being censored.

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> He was served with an NSL requiring him to nefariously gather the private encrypted emails of his users.

Should really be:

He was served with an NSL requiring him to gather the private encrypted emails of one of his users.

Rather less inflammatory, and more accurate - the NSL really only affected the person (actually, it may have been slightly more - two people?) using the service that was being targeted. The reason the service was shut down was because of the precendent; the request was definitely not for blanket access to all users communications, which would be blatantly illegal.

> the request was definitely not for blanket access to all users communications, which would be blatantly illegal.

Actually, this is exactly what was requested (and was eventually provided).

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/

From your cite:

> "earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata."

> "the documents indicate the bureau was still trying only to capture metadata on one user."

> "while the metadata stream would be captured by a device, the device does not download, does not store, no one looks at it, [and] at the back end of the filter, we get what we’re required to get under the order."

> "So there’s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever, [...] No one looks at that, no one stores it, no one has access to it."

So, they were still only looking for (and recording) metadata on one user...

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