Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Once you've been contacted the first time under an NSL letter, what stops you from choosing to broadcast the entire duration of the ordeal.

government: "Here's an NSL." recipient: "Cool deal. I will respect it and not mention it to anyone, but be aware that from this point forward I will always have a device that will broadcast every interaction verbal or electronic that anyone has to me publicly live in real-time to the Internet. You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand? Anything you say may be used against you in the court of public opinion. Do you understand? If you wish to continue to communicate with me, be aware that any statement that you or anyone from your office makes to me will instantly and irreversibly become part of the public record."

On top of that you can hand them a special email address for their use only and you can delete your own personal email. You can also wear a shirt with friends and family that informs them in big bold letters that everything is a matter of the public record.

This would essentially serve to shield you entirely from secret communication by placing a "force field" of publicity around you. There might be some law somewhere that prohibits this tactic, I cannot imagine how they would counteract this tactic legally so long as you always greet them with disclosure that your are recording everything. I imagine that they could try to force you somehow to interact with them in a location that prohibits recording devices.

Courts are made of people, not computers; and they care about the bottom line, not the reasoning behind the loophole. What you describe -- and every other thought experiment, like warrant canaries -- is a good way to spend the rest of your life in jail for contempt of court.

If you get an NSL, shut down your business and leave the country.

> If you get an NSL, shut down your business and leave the country.

This sentence (and the fact it is so hard to argue with) is one of the most chilling things I've read this year. Great work! (I guess?)

Are you sure they'll allow you to leave the country in this case? They have no-fly list and border control after all.

Alternately, you could just leave copies of all of your communications on a Dropbox that gets "hacked" and leaked to the press.

Putting the data on Dropbox's service may well be a felony itself. They don't really care how you transmit the gag-ordered information to the third party.

Also, AFAIK, they get to read the NSL/FISA warrant but not keep a copy. So there's that, too.

We can already see the Ladar knows how to use publicity. Every time he ends a communication, it's some unsupported, wild accusation that gets everyone talking. I feel like everyone is throwing away good scientific skepticism to jump on the anti-NSA bandwagon. There is a legal and logical reason for the NSA to have some secrets. Ladar should be more forthcoming however. He has yet to say anything substantial, imho. There is plenty he could be saying but the press loves this shit; they will do fine without actual content in their releases.

The thing is, no NSL is keeping Ladar Levison from telling us what he knows about email in general. NSLs are specific to the information being sequestered, everything else if fair game. Yet he says "if you knew what I knew." That's just immature posturing. Tell us what you know or say nothing. Waving around your supposed "big secret" in the press like some celeb for gossip? It's not what honest engineers do. Every time I hear a word from the mouth of this Ladar character, I trust him less.

This idea of "Using a force field of publicity" is completely illogical because all it does it serve to fuel wild speculations and distractions! Where are the FACTS?

He did share the problem with us. The problem is that he's not allowed to say exactly why he had to shut down 10 years of work. That's not speculation---it's his account of the facts. Presumably we give him credibility because of the history of Lavabit. I know I do.

Yes exactly, that's all we know. Lavabit got an NSL. Snowden had an email account there in July. We knew that for a while now so what is this post about?

You're reading too much into the title. That's just using a quote to get page views, so don't get hung up on it. The actual content is about what he went through, which is still relevant.

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