What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
We all have families here.
I can imagine NSL-like letters being sent directly to individuals to coerce/threaten them into handing over data, without the management/legal team ever knowing.
Of course, having such a canary message is likely better than not having it.
Have you passed this by a lawyer? Can the requirement to keep the NSLs secret be used to legally coerce you to lie?
This is a fascinating glimpse into the logistical aspects. Either the FBI was trolling to see if they'd roll over easily, or they were baiting them into some kind of reaction. I wonder what would have happened had they gone super public with their "we plan on NSLing you" notification?
Do you encrypt all your own e-mail, as a result of this stuff?
No, that’s really hard.
Of course that implies these services to actually care about security for their users this much. There are a ton of things major companies could to do make end-to-end encryption mainstream and popular. The problem is they have no interest in doing it, and not enough people are asking them to do it.
But I'd like to think that in a Post-PRISM world where nothing changes at the government level, there would be more services popping up and offering these "features". It's what competition is supposed to do.
Build checking whether a public key is available via the STMP servers, do it transparently with designated trusted pub key repos much like browsers have trusted CAs or something along the lines of dns.
Problem still stands, lose your pub key, all mail signed with it is lost to you and people will complain. You could offer a service that allows folks to store and retrive the pub key, but that kinda misses the point because anyone who stores that info can hand it over to the NSA et all.
Other problem with this is the .GOV could MITM this service, give you a fake pub key, read the mail, then resign with read pub key and send it on. You need your mail client to actually register the pub key on first send and hope you weren't always being intercepted from the start, and give you a warning when the key changes.
Torture, disappearances, indefinite secret imprisonment without trial or access to lawyers or medical care, inflitration and mass arrests of people participating in nonviolent protest, agent provacateurs, lying to the congress, spying on virtually everyone, giving retroactive immunity to and pardoning criminal lackeys, and mass murder on a scale the Taliban couldn't achieve in their wildest dreams.
These are not the actions of "whitehats" or "good guys", no matter what the lapdog media and corrupt, self-serving politicians may tell you.
“I did go home that night and over dinner with my family, I said, “Ask me what it was I did today, and remember my answer.” So my son, who was, I don’t know, nine, or something like that, asked me, “Daddy, what did you do today?” And I said, “I can’t tell you.” That was the only thing I said, and then months and months and months went by.
Just so utterly defeatingly unacceptable. This is not my America.