Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

"After his announcement last Thursday, a second company, Silent Circle, based in Maryland, said it would close its secure e-mail service. That company said it had not been served with a government order of any kind. In a pre-emptive bid to protect its customers’ data, Silent Circle said it had obliterated everything in its server."

Uh, what? This could almost be the story satirized by this passage from 1911:

"A certain German art expert, who had obtained from the municipality of Bergamo permission to inspect the famous masterpiece, declared it to be a spurious Pincini... The editor of an Italian art journal refuted the contentions of the German expert and undertook to prove that his private life did not conform to any modern standard of decency. The whole of Italy and Germany were drawn into the dispute, and the rest of Europe was soon involved in the quarrel. There were stormy scenes in the Spanish Parliament, and the University of Copenhagen bestowed a gold medal on the German expert (afterwards sending a commission to examine his proofs on the spot), while two Polish schoolboys in Paris committed suicide to show what THEY thought of the matter."

-- Saki, "The Background" (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/clovis/chapter6.html)

Uh, what? This could almost be...

They're nothing alike. Suppose Silent Circle sent an email to all its users announcing that they would destroy the data on the server in 7 days. It's a good bet the government has accounts on most privacy-advocating web services, simply to keep tabs. That gives the government 7 days to try to get a FISA warrant, or if they think they can get away with it, unilaterally issue a NSL.

They would only be able to subpoena a few of the email accounts (or maybe a lot, but certainly not all), but that still breaks the privacy model many people assume given its advertisement as "secure" webmail.

Silent Circle didn't want to take the chance, and your hyperbolic parallel notwithstanding, they had good reason to do what they did.

Hmm, I think we're making different assumptions about what happened to Lavabit, so it might be useful to discuss this more.

I was assuming that:

a) Lavabit can't access its users' email, so any subpoenas are ineffective at getting at emails stored in their servers.

b) However, the feds would force them to snoop on decrypted data for specific accounts as it is served back to the user. This would only give access to what the user happens to read after the order goes into effect.

c) They received a new order that was a lot more invasive, perhaps to snoop on all plaintext data as it left their servers.

d) They suspended operations before any such snooping could occur.

If all this is true, any other operation can follow the same steps. If the feds ask for too much, we suspend operations immediately, no 7 days. But they wouldn't need to preemptively suspend before the feds come knocking. Is there something wrong with my reasoning? Were you making different assumptions?

Actually they would, with a NSL the Government can (and has been suspected of in the past) force a Service provider to remain operational, or not to do anything that would interfere with the collection of the data they are looking for.

Now I dont know if the NSA attempted that with Lavabit, or if Lavabit willfully ignored that demand, etc but the government does have that legal power.

Where does the money come from in that case? Does the Government writes checks to keep things up and running then? Or does it prohibit declaring bankruptcy?

Sounds remarkably familiar...

"In the name of the general welfare, to protect the people's security, to achieve full equality and total stability, it is decreed for the duration of the national emergency that:

...

Point Two. All industrial, commercial, manufacturing and business establishments of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth remain in operation, and the owners of such establishments shall not quit nor leave nor retire, nor close, sell or transfer their business, under penalty of the nationalization of their establishment and of any and all of their property.

..." [1]

[1] http://conservapedia.com/Directive_10-289

But they can't prevent employees from resigning, can they? If yes, the 13th amendment is gone as well as the 4th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

It depends what you care about more, the emails or the privacy. The privacy is now ensured, and it isn't like they've erased the emails from the users' minds, only the records of the email.

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