Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping | Hacker News Reader

Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

theguardian.com

706 pointstehmaco233 comments

I hope those who treated me with scorn for suggesting the politicians and business people are effectively blackmailed by the mere existence of NSA type spying can now see it for real.

No direct threat, not conversation, no deals. Just the fear of the knowledge that one is being comprehensively watched, and what "they" might have. This fear is enough to alter behavior, to conform.

Again, at what stage can we describe the US and UK, and their co-conspirators as fascist, police state, oppressive, and so on?

Or, do we have micro targeted oppression? Is that the modern way?

This isn't new, this was why Hoover stayed in power for so long. He had files on everyone.

Remember, information is power.

Is there a way for people to initiate impeachment of Obama / get rid of scumbags from the Government given the number of lies and mess that's already out there?

Like it or not but a lot of non-American users see these actions like a bid to take over the Internet. It is a sort of waging a war against the rest of the world. Treating ordinary citizens from outside America default as terrorists and subjecting 'em to round-the-clock surveillance is a gross violation of human rights.

Why is the world silent on this? Why do I read 'only American citizens deserve privacy' in every piece of debate and discussion out there?

IMO, a historic equivalent of this type of naked surveillance was when the Jews were stripped of their clothes under Nazi Germany (I know this sounds a bit over the top, but well it's not). The world needs to stop thinking that privacy is grant only to those who belong to certain nations.

[Edit: Thank you for the negative votes. The statements hold true despite your lack of respect for opinions.]

The remedies are the power of the purse, which won't necessarily be followed but which we are attempting and got very close in the first vote in the House, and/or impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, which is an inherently political act. In practice, as the political lay of the land is today, I'm not even sure Obama would be impeached and convicted if he were "caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy" (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edwin_Edwards).

Touching on the Jews in Europe before and during WWII, first they were stripped of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (e.g. see this in two months: http://www.amazon.com/Gun-Control-Third-Reich-Disarming/dp/1...). As you may have heard, the US is going in the opposite direction outside of what we're taking to calling "slave states" like New York and Maryland, and probably California soon. We have options, please see here for previous discussion before you dismiss this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155921

Agreed. But since this is about catching everyone else in bed on the planet it gets far more serious than a ... say a Monica Lewinsky episode. I believe breach of privacy globally is a very serious offence and it should be measured as such.

You and I bearing licensable firearms from the pop and mom stores is absolutely no parallel to the capability that the agencies possess. Strength of gun laws seems suspect in the era of drones, robotics and the goldmine of everyone's data and emotions.

The Monica Lewinsky based impeachment that wasn't followed by a real trial in the Senate was about perjury, not catching someone in bed (if the latter it was the worst kept secret in US history, do a search on bimbo eruptions). We (used to) expect better from our Presidents.

"licensable" firearms? I don't know what benighted jurisdiction you live in, but in mine we don't need no stinking licenses to buy or own them. We do need one to carry concealed (only a handful of states don't), but that's in part a different thing, but it still makes certain acts of terror more difficult and expensive. Please read the discussion I linked to which touches on that, and don't doubt for a second that the more forward thinking/paranoid or whatever members of the RKBA community aren't working through how to operate in an era of pervasive surveillance.

As SF authors and readers have for decades and decades, I'm checking now and the first story I read on this theme was "The Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garret, first published in 1954 in Astounding, I read it in the early '70s in a superb 1968 Robert Silverberg collection Men and Machines.

And pay attention to the maxim "Professionals discuss logistics".

> "licensable" firearms

By that I meant arms that are available for sale on the market. Sorry, it didn't come off as accurately as I intended. Will definitely read up Men and Machines, next.

True, the NSA doesn't respect the privacy of any non-American on the planet in bulk. This is more than just a privacy violation. Also the NSA might respect an Americans privacy if they are farther than three hops from a foreigner, kinda like saying they don't.

If you think this is just an American problem you are deceiving yourself.

The NSA "hoovers" information, but it doesn't refer to the vacuum cleaner anymore.

Ummm, no. I'm sure he didn't have files on my parents (well, perhaps aside from a pro-forma one on my father, who as an USNavy officer for 4 years in the '50s would I believe have gotten a Secret clearance as all officers do today), he had files on everyone "important". And e.g. the fruits of bugging Goldwater's campaign airplane, as ordered by LBJ. About the latter he said something to the effect of "If the President orders it...."

There's a qualitative difference between "The government has its eye on 'important' people" and "The government is spying on every phone call everyone makes" etc. (the metatdata collection we're pretty sure is happening from the Snowden leaks which included a blanket writ for all of Verizon Businesses' metadata).

I think the thing we need to consider is that they don't need to have explicit files per se on anybody anymore.

It seems more likely that if a file was needed on you, they could generate one by simply typing some PII (say, a name and address) into a computer form, which then causes form letters to be sent mail merge style to credit agencies, retailers, telecoms, and major social networks requesting your information. Then, as the relevant data comes in, it gets added to an electronic folder to be accessed by whomever thinks they need access to it.

For the most part it's true they could quickly generate a file, but they could have done that in 1998 as well (modulo the lack of things like Facebook at the time).

Being able to instantly pull up email contents would certainly be different in scale and scope though!

I doubt it; POP3 and SMTP are plaintext. Put a few wiretap in at major colos; build a few data centers, maintain a couple of essentially very large hashtables and it seems plausible that they could instantly pull up email contents.

It'd be a bit bigger scale than GMail search or whatever corporations use for e-Discovery in Outlook, but it'd be plausible.

Whether the government allocated budget to such a contraption is another matter; I think that would be a bigger concern than the technical plausibility of "store everyone's email for all time in perpetuity". I mean, if GMail was supposed to fulfill that vision (ha!) then it can't possibly be unreasonable for a determined government to build it.

Great point, and this is a big reason why the "I have nothing to hide" argument comes from a position of childlike naivety.

Even if you have nothing to hide, what about your members of parliament? CEOs? Mayors? President or Prime Minister? Judges? Police chiefs?

Is there a single one that has never written an email or made a phone call that could destroy their career? What lengths would they go to in order to keep it private? Do you honestly expect them to fall on their sword for the good of the nation?

Giving a shadowy group with essentially no oversight access to damn near every skeleton in the closet society has under the guise of "security" is analogous stuffing your house with munitions and trusting your kids not to play with matches.

Do you want the NSA or GCHQ knowing that your teenage daughter is pregnant before you do?

I would certainly expect it if Target already does, but then this just highlights how pervasive the problem is.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...]

The nude pictures she texted to her boyfriend are now part of her permanent file as well.

Wow, good point. Never considered it that way, only my own personal reasons.

It is interesting to reflect upon the phrase "I have nothing to hide". The first thing to note is that it is very selfish and self-centered: "I have nothing to hide". People who say the phrase don't seem to realize that other people may be doing perfectly harmless things in private that are illegal, or at least would get them ostracized.

The second point about the phrase is it has an implicit timeframe: "I have nothing to hide right now". Those who say it regularly seem to lack any foresight (or memory of history) or imagination and can't seem to visualize a future in which they might (even unintetionally) do something which will put them on the bad side of the law. They also don't seem to consider the possibility that the prohibition against ex post facto laws could be suspended.

Agreed. If you cannot rely on the people you elect to not be blackmailed then the system is essentially worthless.

People who say they have nothing to hide feel that way because they think they've done nothing wrong. They fail to realize how easy it is to take something you've done that was considered legal and suddenly make it illegal. Once the now illegal activity has become a social stigma then the information that you once participated in those activities can be used against you.

Example? Once upon a time sending an email to a person in a foreign country wasn't suspect. Now it is. Sending it to someone in a certain country can likely make you a target of the government. Whatever label is attached to the person you are corresponding to will then be attached to you. This was how it was done during the Communism scare in the US after World War II. You spoke with a known Communist? Then you must be a Communist.

Never mind easy blackmail material that people in positions of power tend to get themselves into.

As a UK resident, I feel like I can speak to the question of whether we can describe the UK (I pass no judgement on the US) as oppressive or a police state, so here's my take on it.

I don't necessarily agree that GCHQ or the NSA spying on UK subjects is a great idea, I don't like the idea that all of my communications are collected and available to analyse should I ever blow anything up or should someone in GCHQ take a disliking to me, but if I consider issue at hand, ie, do I feel oppressed or do I live under a police state, I'd say the answer is categorically no, I do not.

I do not live in fear of the police kicking down my door because I voiced an anti-government view online. I do not believe that if I openly start supporting the wrong party I'll "disappear" as happens in other countries. I believe that elections in the UK are free and fair (for the most part) and I also believe that if a party came along that tried to turn the UK into the kind of country where those things were a reality then they would be sharply booted out of office.

I also, incidentally, believe that if a party came along whose main policy was that they'd fiercely protect everyone's privacy they'd get precisely nowhere in the polls. Not because of any big conspiracy, but because people care more about their taxes and wheely bin collection rota's than about whether GCHQ knows who they email and why. Everyone I've spoken to on the subject already assumed they knew that anyway due to the fact that they are a spy agency. The tech-crowd's collective anger over the Snowden revelations isn't mirrored amongst the general population - at least in my experience. If it were, then no doubt things would change. That's how democracy works.

> I do not live in fear of the police kicking down my door because I voiced an anti-government view online. I do not believe that if I openly start supporting the wrong party I'll "disappear" as happens in other countries. I believe that elections in the UK are free and fair (for the most part) and I also believe that if a party came along that tried to turn the UK into the kind of country where those things were a reality then they would be sharply booted out of office.

I was discussing this with some tech-minded friends on IRC the other day, and they pointed out the "chilling effect" you could get with massive surveillance.

And I have to say I see their point. But after thinking about it some more I've realized that I've not once ever been scared to say something bad about the government (and yes, that's happened a lot).

But I have been scared to discuss these topics with my friends, here on HN, etc. It's only a matter of time before I piss off the wrong hacker, so there is a "chilling effect" going on... it's just not the one all my friends are warning me about. :-/

To me, the fact that you or I aren't scared isn't proof that a chilling effect does not exist. I'm not much of a "influencer" or "trend setter". Thus, even if i say something bad about the government, why would they bother? Things change when you're talking about journalists and political opposition. The fact that big brother is always listening makes a hell of a difference.

> Things change when you're talking about journalists and political opposition.

Sure, but I haven't yet found either American journalists or political opponents who were scared to tear into the U.S. government at any opportunity, or even any pretext for an opportunity.

It's one of the ways by which Americans have maintained freedom of expression in that regard, is to make complaining about the government so commonplace as to be utterly and completely ordinary.

You don't work in journalism or political activism and you don't care about people that do. Got it.

While the NSA stuff is really bad, what Groklaw is doing is absurd and should be called such.HN seems happy to point out that more people die from furniture than terrorism, but yet unwilling to correct people with similarly misguided opinions when it comes to this.

1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or not accept tips except via public comments but still operate.

2)Most of the people Groklaw corresponds with don't need anonymity either. Those that do presumably know it and hence, will not correspond with them absent secure means (once made aware of the need for them)

3) Groklaw isn't an email service provider, it's a legal blog/online magazine. As such, likely none of the NSA's mechanisms for getting information from email providers apply. Compelling individuals to hand over their own correspondence is, as far as we know, hard. It can get worse with freedom of the press issues.

So post a PGP key and say, if you really want anonymity, use this.(Edit) and use a mixnet or Pond, or something to send the message. PGP encrypted email from a new account just deals with the NSA's email intercept capability. If you are worried about their other abilities, you need something stronger then Tor since it fails for global passive adversary.

Of course, that wouldn't get them publicity

"So post a PGP key and say, if you really want anonymity, use this."

PGP only provides confidentiality, not anonymity. To get anonymity as well would require TOR.

Yeah, I realized my mistake, but Tor is not very useful against the NSA since it doesn't protect against a global passive adversary.

Maybe you should not so easily judge an operation you know nothing about. I will assume until proven otherwise by sufficient insight into the groklaw project that pj is an honest agent who sincerely feels that what groklaw does cannot be done with the nsa snooping in place.

> I will assume until proven otherwise by sufficient insight into the groklaw project that pj is an honest agent who sincerely feels that what groklaw does cannot be done with the nsa snooping in place

That's not what PJ said.

What PJ said is that she doesn't feel comfortable with using the internet with the NSA surveillance in place, and given her decision to minimize internet exposure, it is impossible for Groklaw to continue.

Its not about what Groklaw does particularly, its about her own comfort level with use of the internet at all given the surveillance situation.

>1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or not accept tips except via public comments but still operate.

That's what confuses me. The majority of Groklaw's content comes from PACER filings, which are public(at a cost). To my knowledge, they never posted anonymous rumors, and instead focused solely on the facts of the cases they cared about as presented on court. And honestly, if it's comments they are worried about... those are hardly private.

Groklaw never claimed it depended on anonymous tips. They claimed that it in general changes how people communicate and that the author is just as uncomfortable with an unauthorized person going through their email as if they were going through their underwear drawer.

I can say that pj has always been protective of her privacy, even when Groklaw was essentially focused only on the SCO vs. IBM drama playing out. She's also a paralegal by training with a tech interest (which explains her comments about the rule of law), but she was not necessarily an expert in technical infrastructure, protocols, etc. Typically she relied on experts and other collaborators for things which needed a hefty dose of technical know-how on her site.

So with that in mind I was quite shocked to read this morning that pj has abandoned the site, for the reasons you mention. But I can say that from what I've read of her over the years (I've had Groklaw on RSS for years now), it does kind of make sense if you look at it from her worldview; she values her privacy, geeks everywhere are saying that the NSA is literally reading every piece of mail sent by anyone to anyone, and the result is then not completely surprising...

> 1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or not accept tips except via public comments but still operate.

I dont think Groklaw claimed it dependes on anonymous tips. The Groklaw fair well did indicate that they valued the privacy of their communications however just as they value not having anyone riffle through their underwear drawer.

> 2)Most of the people Groklaw corresponds with don't need anonymity either. Those that do presumably know it and hence, will not correspond with them absent secure means (once made aware of the need for them)

The need for anonymity was not claimed. No one siad lives or livelihoods were at direct risk. It was claimed that in general people act differently when they know they are being watched, recorded, or when it could be used against them in the future.

> 3) Groklaw isn't an email service provider, it's a legal blog/online magazine. As such, likely none of the NSA's mechanisms for getting information from email providers apply. Compelling individuals to hand over their own correspondence is, as far as we know, hard. It can get worse with freedom of the press issues.

I would assume that all of the email in question is likely to go through a email service provider and the NSA's normal mechanisms will work against that email provider. My understanding is that is uncommon for the NSA to compel "individuals to hand over their own correspondence" and that is normally happens at the email provider level.

> So post a PGP key and say, if you really want anonymity, use this.(Edit) and use a mixnet or Pond, or something to send the message. PGP encrypted email from a new account just deals with the NSA's email intercept capability. If you are worried about their other abilities, you need something stronger then Tor since it fails for global passive adversary.

What percentage of interested customers are lost when you add one more confirmation button in-between them and buying a product? I am sure a high percentage of people, interested in maintaing their privacy, are lost when GPG is required.

> What percentage of interested customers are lost when you add one more confirmation button in-between them and buying a product? I am sure a high percentage of people, interested in maintaing their privacy, are lost when GPG is required.

This is true, there are massive usability problems. But you keep infinitely more customers if you keep your service running and allow them to choose if they want anonymity. In fact, again, I think most people don't care for this case.

This is sort of the problem. Groklaw made the decision for their users in effect. We won't let you choose if you want privacy. I realize PJ is a party to those conversations and s/he gets to make privacy choices too for his/her end, but i am at al loss as to why someone accustom to public blog posts cannot conduct most of her correspondence about those public posts under the assumption they will be public.

1) there was a claim by her that some sources are anonymous 2) always leave avenues of information open 3) Who is the press? Congress currently is trying to define who is the press and who is not. They seem to forget the 1st applies mentions speech and press separately. As for the PGP key, I am quite sure when they want it a FISA court will force you to give them your private key and not to say that you did.

The government cannot be trusted with the information they are gathering. I don't care how many promises of "it won't be used", "it is private", "and it will be deleted". If anything the "leaks" from the IRS of people's personal information prove that no information is safe in the hands of government because they cannot keep their own people from misusing it.

Who is to say that someone decides something posted to Groklaw gets some politicians panties in a wad? All the privacy rules in the world won't amount to jack if he has friends who accidentally find and leak it. Its been done in other organizations, it will occur with the NSA data. Most likely it will start showing up during election season.

The new laws (I don't know how far they went?) that would declare bloggers "not the press" and under which bloggers lose even now debatable protection, together with the total collection of communication is really a good thing to make any blogger involved in controversies reconsider his future activity.

Still I don't believe that the NSA activity is directly what moved PJ. We know that they give tips to other agencies from time to time but it's still FBI who's in charge for the things inside of the US.

I remember that PJ already attempted to stop contributing directly to Groklaw. Now she really "closes the shop."

Groklaw isn't an organization, its a personal project, and its not shutting down because of the impact of the NSA revelations on Groklaw's mission, but because of the personal impact on the site operator.

Groklaw is shutting down because Pamela Jones, in the wake of the NSA revelations, has made a "personal decision [...] to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible".

This

This clarification should be at the top the discussion

Yes, but she also made it clear that she often gets tips from sources that prefer to remain anonymous. Given that she comments on some pretty high-level court cases, this makes her a target.

Take the Apple vs Samsung cases for example. It's very clear that these cases have become national political issues that have reached the desk of POTUS. What's to stop someone with close relations high up with relations to Obama, such as Tim Cook or an employee with close relations to the NSA due to collaboration between Apple and the NSA to ask a favor to figure out a leak that informed one of her blog stories? Given that parallel construction is official policy, we would have no way of knowing whether or not a corporate leaker was caught due to NSA involvement.

>HN seems happy to point out that more people die from furniture than terrorism, but yet unwilling to correct people with similarly misguided opinions when it comes to this.

This logic is broken.

While more people may die from furniture than terrorism, what the NSA is doing is ensure that ZERO people are free. Period. You are not free when you simpl cannot communicate with another human being via electronic means without the government's ability to actually be party to that comm.

While I cannot comment on any of these decisions to shut down their businesses - the fact that they are doing so shows that we are in a really really REALLY bad place with respect to any level of trust in the government.

America is dead.

So where do we live? Every single thing that the US stood for has literally been murdered in the last 13 years.

We are not the land of the free. We are not a home for the brave. We have zero moral standing on any issue. We are 100% completely corrupt and destroyed as any nation we were raised to believe in.

I believe this all leads to one place. A world war - but not between nations. Between humans and their governments.

The systems of control will be stamping out any resistance to their control in the next few years. It doesnt get better from here.

Comments like "We are 100% completely corrupt", "Every single thing that the US stood for has literally been murdered", and "America is dead" are so absurdly over the top that they undercut your message and turn off people who might otherwise be receptive to your comments.

While I am sure you are correct, I can't help that this is how I actually feel.

The entire concept of "America", for me, has completely dissolved.

The sad part is I now even have difficulty with the term "legal". All meaning from these terms has been removed.

We live in an illusion. The actual reality we live in is a simple binary relationship: The haves. The have-nots.

Those who have power (money) do literally anything they want in any situation. Legality is a tool to oppress the have-nots.

So, take my upvote for calling me out on being emotional - but also know that I am actually having difficulty with the reality of the world we live in.

Reality check, the NSA, Bush and increasingly Obama, the whole US Government and it's justice system, etc. don't represent the American ideal. But with a few exceptions I would wager that I would rather live here then almost any other country in the world. What is "American" comes from you and what you viewpoint is of that ideal. For me what constitutes as American has much more to do with my relationships with people here, who I meet, where I live, then anything stupid the NSA or government does. I think overall what's kind of silly about this is you're taking something that realistically is extremely abstract to the vast majority of people (how many of use are dealing with Snowden's problems on a personal level here?) and applying it to a whole country and it's people.

Don't get me wrong, I think people should be angry with what's been happening, the eroding of the American dream, increased inequality, the continued militarization of the police and it's overall unaccountability, lack of privacy from both the government and businesses (let's not forget what type of data the Google's and Facebook's of the world legally have on you). It's going to take indignation and anger to result in the action that might change things.

But, to turn around and say some thing like "America is dead"? No, personally I see things that make me proud of my fellow Americans, the goals they're accomplishing, the big dreams they have, the relationships they develop and grow from. I see those things happening on this forum everyday. No, to me America is around and kicking all around, the proof is right here in front of you, and it's worth fighting for. I'm not willing to write it off just yet.

So it's not bad enough yet? I have watched everything the progressive left has warned America about for the last twenty five years come true and at every turn I have heard the same thing, "You are overreacting."

Media Consolidation, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, Glass Steagall, etc.

The issue that Groklaw broaches specifically is one that has major consequences. Change in America comes from upstarts, individuals who put their fear aside and try new things. Things that often throw a wrench into the works of established economic interests. What is now being made clear is that any plans you make might just find their way into the hands of your disruptee.

PJ makes clear that she is scared, and to you it may not be rational, but that's not the point. She was willing to put herself at the front of a machine that regularly goes toe to toe with powerful entities. But now she is not and how many others will not even try in this current environment?

I am surrounded by young people and the prevailing attitude is that the game is rigged, why even try? I've watched progressives grow older and walk away as soon as they realized that they had something to lose and that their opponents are vindictive.

When that fear sinks in, it is over. No one does anything except the privileged who can't fail.

You're succumbing to slippery slope hysteria. Probably your whole life, the government has overstepped the boundaries of the 4th amendment when it came to poor black people. But I bet if I told you a few years ago about that, you wouldn't have said it made "the entire concept of America" dissolve for you. And rightfully so. The fact that some people in the government do some things you think should be illegal, does not mean that the rule of law has ceased to have force.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but America has always been deeply imperfect. You talk about the "last 13 years" but you know nothing about the history of America if you think it was better 30 or 50 years ago. But the arc of history has been that America has gotten less imperfect over time. We find NSLs and the resort to esoteric legal defenses on the part of the NSA intolerable today, but those are niceties in the grand scheme of things. Remember, we're a country where Bureau of Prohibition agents ransacked peoples' physical property looking for alcohol in the 1930's, a country that put Japanese-Americans in internment in the 1940's, a country where the President had to call the national guard down to Alabama to get the governor to comply with a federal court order. You think that reading through Facebook posts or asking the British government to detain someone in an airport for 9 hours is what marks the end of America? That's hysteria.

It should be noted that the surveillance programs seem pretty designed to stay on the right side of existing Supreme Court precedent. That's pretty much the opposite of the government doing "literally anything" it wants. That doesn't mean what its doing is right, but trying to skirt through holes in the law is very different from ignoring the law. And there was a time when the government didn't even bother with that pretense.

>It should be noted that the surveillance programs seem pretty designed to stay on the right side of existing Supreme Court precedent.

I am pretty sure that what is slowly being revealed by Greenwald from Snowden's files is proving this to be false.

Supreme Court ruled phone metadata is not entitled to Fourth Amendment protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland

I talk abou the last 13 years because it was a coup by the intelligence apparatus, led by the Agents of the Carlyle Group to brazenly take over the american military completely.

I know a lot of what was done in the last 50 years - and in the last 40, there has been one agency specifically working night and day to subvert the structure of the government, and led by a few people.

The CIA, since its inception after WWII as it evolved from the OSS into what it is today was founded upon the SS where they absorbed as many SS officers the US culd get their hands on.

Up until 2001 - there was still a split between the MIC and "regular america" -- after 2001 - that split dissolved and the DHS was built to encapsulate all intel services under one branch, and under one puppet of the CIA cabal.

Even if you have other valid points, please take the conspiracy theories elsewhere. It just weakens your argument.

You're calling it a conspiracy theory simply because you have not followed what has actually happened.

Every thing I wrote there is actual history.

> Every thing I wrote there is actual history.

The one thing I see that is an easily verifiable fact claim in your post, to wit, "the DHS was built to encapsulate all intel services under one branch, and under one puppet of the CIA cabal," is clearly false, since:

* At the time DHS was formed in 2002, all intel services were (as members of the "US intelligence community"), already had a single head, the Director of Central Intelligence. This did not change with the formation of DHS.

* Both before and after the formation of DHS, the agencies making up the US intelligence community were scattered among numerous cabinet level departments (in the post-DHS-formation period, this includes the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, Energy, Justice, and Treasury), plus the CIA (which is not part of any department.)

* After the formation of DHS, in 2005, the DCI's role as head of the Intelligence Community was shifted to the newly created positon of the Direct of National Intelligence (DNI), a position separate from the leadership of any particular Intelligence Community member like the CIA.

It was a coup. Who was the first head of DHS? Where did he come from? Who put him there? Why?

It goes all the way back to his role in 'Nam and who he worked for there...

Once they setup the structure, with the DHS, then later creating the DNI - they created a separate entity that serves the goals of the cabal, Carlye is just a main face of that.

It was all about creating a structure that put true power in the hands of something outside the previous branches.

This seems more appropriate for Infowars or Godlike productions, especially your use of such acronyms as 'MIC' - a shorthand for 'men in charge' rather than any actual organization. Standardizing the terminology of conspiracy theories is a substitute for testing and validation.

I dispute your CIA conspiracy theory and suggest such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which you have failed to provide and which is not supported by the historical record. Also, I'm not American and didn't grow up here, so please don't fall back on the usual counterargument that I'm too conditioned to see what you have convinced yourself to be obvious.

MIC: Military industrial complex.

It is a real thing.

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-mili...

>I dispute your CIA conspiracy theory and suggest such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which you have failed to provide and which is not supported by the historical record. Also, I'm not American and didn't grow up here

Yeah, so you really are unaware of what has happened in the US. Everything I said IS a part of "historical Record" -- but not the one you'll find on CNN or FOX. You'll actually have to do some investigation and discovery.

Start with Smedley Butler, Operation Paperclip and work from there.

I'd be happy to lay out more info - and you can find some in my comment history.

Just because YOU have no idea what happened doesn't mean that what I say is false, nor that it is suddenly my job to educate you.

MIC: Military industrial complex. It is a real thing.

It is not 'a real thing.' It is an opinion (a perfectly valid one, I might add) about socio-political structures. There are many such lobbies in the body politic, and the existence of such sociopolitical factions have been observed by writers from Aristotle onwards. Cozy relationships, mutual interests, and even corruption falls far short of the sort of coup you purport to describe.

Yeah, so you really are unaware of what has happened in the US.

Not in the least - I read War is a racket and studied the Business Conspiracy many long years ago, thank you. You are the one making the case for an overarching conspiracy, it's up to you to offer up evidence for it. Namechecking this or that data point in history with no attempt at perspective isn't evidence, it's handwaving; and responding to requests for evidence with accusations of ignorance isn't argument, it's propaganda.

I do not object to your criticizing this government or government institutions in general, but I am sick to the back teeth of your axe-grinding, crappy sources, and empty arguments. Pardon my bluntness, but you're an outrage junkie. You like being angry about 'how bad things are' to the extent that you have adopted it as a premise.

You're getting better at this "This isn't America's worst; look at history" argument. I can tell it's been used on Hacker News quite a bit before :)

And yet it's not an "argument" so much as the cold, solid truth. There is like a 23-page DoJ PDF about the legal theory behind the NSA programs being discussed, an ongoing conversation at the POTUS level, an introductory guide by the NSA themselves into how some of those systems are meant to work, and much more.

If this is a police state, it's not a police state that I've ever read about in my history books. You think Putin is patiently explaining to all of his Russian citizens (and Snowden) the exact niceties of why their suveillance systems are needed to fight Chechnya-based Islamism, and patiently debating with parliamentarians in the Duma?

Even The Guardian notes how they preferred the U.S. to the U.K. to work their stories. Only in America would this type of thing even possibly be a debate the way it is.

Maybe I was unclear; I completely agree with rayiner (and, by extension, you). I've even made the same exact arguments elsewhere, today even.

I meant that it's an argument in that an argument can be either true or false. But yes, you're right.

Ah, sorry.

I did misunderstand, and felt I had to speak up accordingly. Some of my highest-voted posts on HN have been the ones where I've had to patiently remind people that America now is leaps and bounds better than America in almost any other decade by almost any conceivable measure.

Not every measure, for sure. But the history of America is one of constant (if slow) overall improvement; why throw that away? But now I'm preaching to the choir...

If it's any consolation, comments like those from 'rayiner and yourself prompted me to do an in-depth study of United States history from a quality-of-life perspective, and eventually led me to make the same arguments, so they are working, don't be disheartened :)

You're succumbing to slippery slope hysteria.

The slippery slope is a logical fallacy.

Trouble is, government is not a logical entity.

That's cute but totally nonsensical. Logical fallacies are incorrect modes of inference in logical arguments. It's the people who are doing the arguing that must be logical, not the subject matter of the argument.

It's the people who are doing the arguing that must be logical, not the subject matter of the argument.

I don't follow you. If the system you're interacting with isn't logical in nature, then it's not useful to place logical constraints on it. You simply have no idea whether a slippery slope mechanism is at work.

If the people in charge are trying to nudge the Overton Window, then the slippery slope argument is an excellent description of the process at work.

So, I understand where you're coming from. At this point it feels like we should all just pick up our guns, go to the whitehouse and let them really know how we feel. But, there's still hope without that extreme. US History has shown other, more hopeless, situations eventually being fixed. In pretty much all the cases, it took awakening the masses for the change to come about. As powerful as the NSA & USgov seem to be, one thing can destroy it all - awakening the public. Also, the NSA/USgov is playing on our home-turf. Technology & internet is not something they hold an advantage above us on. One slip up on their part, or one good idea on an activist's part, and the masses could wake up and the NSA would fall to pieces in the course of a month or 2. Don't give up, just keep talking about it to anyone who will listen. Keep on increasing the probability of another Snowden. My family doesn't really care or fallow this NSA-stuff, but they have heard of it and it decreased their trust in the government. That's good enough. Just keep decreasing trust in USgov; increase probability of "A wild Snowden suddenly appears!". Eventually, something dramatic will happen and this whole thing will reach a conclusion. I can't say what that conclusion will be though... but it'll happen, it'll be spectacular... and then we'll all know where we stand after the dust clears.

also know that I am actually having difficulty with the reality of the world we live in.

I think your assessment of the world is significantly inaccurate.

I'd LOVE to have my view changed. Would you care to provide your assessment of the world? Seriously.

Every single thing that the USG has said since I have been paying attention - starting in 1986 - every single thing has been a lie. (I first became politically aware when I watched everything related to Iran-Contra with my father.)

It has been nothing but rinse-and-repeat of the same shit since that time. (2008 banking scandal? Try the SNL scandal of 80's)

Every single thing that the USG has said since I have been paying attention - starting in 1986 - every single thing has been a lie.

Sure it has. Every last little thing.

Now if you said that there always seems to be some scandal going on, then guess what, I agree with you. And guess what, that sort of shit has been going on since the founding of the Republic. And guess what, you can find shenanigans in the history of every monarchic, theocratic and republican government all the way back to ancient Rome and beyond. There is no Garden of Eden from which we've been expelled or Golden Age that we've lost, there's only your personal loss of innocence about how flawed humans are.

>Sure it has. Every last little thing.

Pedantic.

With respect to every major event, and every scandal; the position of the USG has invariably been proven to be false.

Iran-Contra, S&L, Gulf War, Iraq War, 2008 banking scandal, NSA (no not wittingly).

So - while you think I am an "outrage junkie" -- how about I actually have principals and fuck the USG and others who are unscrupulous assholes.

Yeah - I am upset about what is going on, and it's funny because you're comments are of the opinion I should just "get over it and realize that humans suck".

Sorry, that's not a position I'll take.

Yeah - I am upset about what is going on, and it's funny because you're comments are of the opinion I should just "get over it and realize that humans suck".

Sorry, that's not a position I'll take.

Then, and not coincidentally, you're doomed to eternal disappointment.

As for my own worldview, I adhere largely to three maxims: Hanlon's razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor), suggesting that one should never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity; public choice theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor); and a cynical reading of the Federalist Papers.

You also failed to share your worldview as I had requested. I'd be certainly interested in hearing it articulated in a comment as opposed to the way you're just refuting mine.

>>> The sad part is I now even have difficulty with the term "legal".

That's because you have been taught that legal is roughly equivalent to right which is roughly equivalent to moral. US culture is very legalistic. All warning signs say "Don't do this - it's the LAW!" - because once it's the law, it is absolute, that's where it ends.

But I can bet nobody taught you - unless you're some rare exception - why things are or should be legal and where the "legal" comes from. US is unique in this regard as it was founded by people who actually thought about this question a lot - unlike most of other countries - and made a set of documents available - including, obviously, the Constitution, but also other works - that explain what they thought and why. But it is only a set of texts, each person has to find for himself/herself where their basic principles are and why the law must be such and not other. If the law has no basis under it, then what you feel is inevitable - since the law can be taken from you and perverted and made to say whatever people in power want it to say - and if you don't know what is beyond the law you have nothing left. You may not even be able to explain why what they are doing is wrong - after all, they have the law on their side, aren't they?

Thanks, I really liked your response.

I fully understand why laws are put in place when they are done so in an empirical fashion e.g. for your safety, ensuring certain codes are followed that ensure structrual soundness of a building, etc.

The problem is when we get people like Holder talking about how it is "legal" for the POTUS to use a drone to murder people in a foreign, supposedly, sovereign nation - even when those people are citizens of the US.

This is where I get confused on the value of "legality".

Insider trading by members of congress is "legal".

Fraudulent foreclosure has been "legal"

When what banks and governments do, while wrong, is called "legal" -- I cannot bring myself to respect anything they represent.

I do agree with your point from the perspective that it will turn people off and marginalize the argument that bad things really are happening. At the same time, a place where 10% of communications are read by the government is not 90% free. The liberty of a place declines exponentially with the violations of that liberty.

If the EFF comes out an announces they won't conduct any of their business because they have no privacy, we would rightly see an issue with it (and they do need privacy for some of what they do).

Chilling effects are an argument against having surveillance. They aren't something we should encourage purely because they allow to point and go: "NSA, look what you broke". That's what I meant about terrorism. If the you refuse to go outside because of terrorism, "the terrorists win." SImilarly, if you refuse to run your site that explains the law to people because the government twits the law to allow them to spy on you (even though you have nothing to hide in your professional capacity of operating that blog), then a different kind of terrorist wins.

Yes, if GrokLaw ran a wikileaks style legal blog which posted confidential stuff, the chilling effect would be necessary. In this case it isn't and since it's unclear when(or if) we will ever regain confidence that the NSA is not spying on us, we ought to minimize the damage.

> You are not free when you simpl cannot communicate with another human being via electronic means without the government's ability to actually be party to that comm.

That's reading a whole lot into the definition of "free." Were people "free" in 1950? If so, how do they become "not free" by introducing a new form of communication (created by the military, mind you) that is monitored more heavily than the ones they used to use?

Red Scare 2.0: The absolute pinnacle of freedom.

Warrantless surveillance certainly happened in 1950, but there did not exist the means by which data about almost everyone could be vacuumed up and correlated. It's entirely feasible to have an intelligence file on the majority of US citizens. In 1950, you would have to be in some way exceptional to have a file with the FBI.

Aside from the technology aspect, there was no Patriot Act and it would at the very least be difficult to detain citizens long term without charges. Sounds less free to me.

Electric communication has existed for 1837 with telegraphs, but really it is not a question of technology (means) but rather the ability to easily communicate with arbitrary people without overly board effective spying (ends). That is, this argument works as well for mail as it does for email, but the parameters are different.

G = Percent of people that the government can spy on for a form of communication (0-1 where 1 is everyone, 0 is no one).

D = Percent of personal data that gets sent using that form of communication (0-1 where 1 is everyone, 0 is no one).

G * D = Freedom Lost.

Using made up but reasonable numbers

Mail = 0.05 * 0.001 = 0.00005

Email = 0.4 * 0.99 = 0.396

Historically mail was used for almost all personal data but the capability to spy on mail was far lower (d= 0.8, G = 0.000001). As time increases communication privacy goes to zero (since both G and D will increase as an average over all means), unless, of course, the trend changes.

You drastically overestimate the government. The US gov can be taken down from the inside if the people want to. They don't want to. Every human alive today has more power at their fingertips than a King a hundred years ago, but go ahead and believe that this is the worst it has ever been, it is a popular fantasy.

Actually I am in no way saying it is the worst it has ever been.

I am saying that we are making zero progress as a species toward a free reality, and this is unacceptable.

Just because this version of America is "better than any other place" doesn't mean it is good.

I refuse to accept such apologistic BS.

Yeah it was worse. It is still bad and that is simply not acceptable.

we are making zero progress as a species toward a free reality

Oh, please. You yourself are providing an obvious piece of evidence against this claim: here you are, posting on HN about how disappointed you are with the US government. People used to have to be rich and/or politically connected to put their thoughts in a place where they could be read by a large audience.

Another piece of evidence is the fact that we are here discussing a public statement about the impact the NSA's activities are having on a service that provided significant value. A few decades ago the NSA was doing the same things they're doing now, but if it affected a particular individual, how were they going to get the word out? What newspaper would publish it? Now we don't have to rely on the media to get the word out.

I get that you're concerned, but please try to keep things in perspective.

Right, so we should all just sit back and let things go the way they are going because I am an uppity little whiner that wants to be able to have a conversation with someone who lives far away without the ability to have that conversation brought up by an NSA subcontractor at any point in MY FUCKING LIFETIME in the future?

Here is some perspective: The NSA is seeking to keep everything that anyone says for the duration of their entire life such that it is searchable whenever they want. That's downright dystopian.

And we are to expect that things are going to get better from here on out?

we should all just sit back and let things go the way they are

Did I say that? I was not saying things are good; I was saying that your claim that we are making zero progress towards a more free humanity is too extreme. We have tools today to fight this that past generations did not have; that's progress.

And we are to expect that things are going to get better from here on out?

Obviously they won't if we ignore the fact that change is not one-sided. The Internet gives governments more ability to snoop, but it also gives us more ability to communicate and coordinate. I think you are concentrating too much on the former and not enough on the latter.

I disagree. We are making progress towards a more free society. Would I like to see more progress, of course and so would most people but they are not going be in favor of trashing the economy and putting their families at risk over a theoretical increase in progress. I do agree that laws cannot be secret for obvious reasons, but I am not sure you can have no secrets.

>We have zero moral standing on any issue.

I'm afraid this and related claims are a little hyperbolic without an itemized list.

At first, I thought similar things. But then when you really look at Groklaw, an important reason for its success is its coverage of matters that probably did require a lot of anonymous sources.

> Of course, that wouldn't get them publicity

So they're shutting down to get publicity for...what?

A different perspective is that we have never been as free as we are today, proven by the fact that we now know exactly to what degree we are not free, a luxury which is historically unique.

Not saying that's the case, just that i think we have never had a truly free society ever anywhere.

Oppression 2.0 - it is unevenly distributed.

Misquoting William Gibson:

"The fascism is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

In essence, that was David Simon's argument in favor of things like PRISM, (paraphrasing) 'Finally an equal-opportunity way for the Iron Boot of Law to be applied!'.

It worked for Hoover and Nixon. We're on a continuum here. Its not like all of the sudden the government decided to start spying on its citizens.

Jones has shut down Groklaw before, in 2011. IT's her choice to make but I don't buy her reasoning, and I certainly don't think it supports your claim of blackmail.

Again, at what stage can we describe the US and UK, and their co-conspirators as fascist, police state, oppressive, and so on?

Well, don't let me stop you since you're obviously aching to do so to bring some excitement into your life. I stand by my opposing view that people today generally enjoy far more freedom than in the past, even as recently as in the cold war.

Look in a textbook at the definitions of "fascist" and "police state" - then read about Hitler's Germany (fascism) and the Cold War KGB (police state). You could even read about Stalin too.

Then you'll know at what point we can call the United States and the United Kingdom fascist and police states.

I would put money that PJ was hacked illegally by large corporations long before the NSA took an interest in her. And that the government knew all about it. She mentions her apartment being broken into... That was almost certainly the work of powers she irked.

In fact PJ is probably the ONE person they have investigated and CHOSE not to bother. She probably had several illegal taps on her stuff way back when she started...this has been gearing up almost as long as Groklaw has been in business and we all "knew" about it, just didn't believe it. The only thing worse than speaking out against the government is speaking out against companies... And she's been doing that for years.

This is a tragedy.

We need to reboot email. Encrypt everything, including metadata -- given current hardware, the client can easily bruteforce it from a list of known keys. Build some sort of easy key distribution tool (connecting via p2p, dns, whatever, just build a goddamn UI). Ask existing transports to relax their restrictions enough to let fully-encrypted mail through, and build some intelligent webmail interface for this (Mailpile, currently being kickstarted, is trying to do smt like that).

We've been dicking around with PGP since the 90s without making any real progress, we've traded security for convenience (GMail, Facebook), it's time somebody reverts the trend.

I disagree. This is a political fight. Technical means can drag the resistance longer, which is helpful, but the political system needs to be put in checks and balances against becoming a police state. There is no substitute of "taking roads and doing peaceful protests" as out of comfort zone they might be.

We sometimes fall in love with our methods because that is what _we_ are good at, not what is necessarily the best course of action.

Again, I am not discounting the importance of improving technical measures, I am just cautioning against losing the sight of the forest for a tree.

I repeat, This is a political fight!

Edit - Added explanation.

I agree it's primarily a political fight, but I think we should work on both.

But it's true that with absolute government power where they can justify anything, and with so many partner countries willing to play along with them - encryption won't get you very far, no matter how good it is and where you are in the world. They'll find a way to put a backdoor into the systems somehow with or without the service provider's knowledge.

One needs to organize to fight politically. if you cant speak, you cant organize. that's why they are going after e-mail...they are desperate to keep themselves in power...

Blimey, what did we do before email?

Printing press: now digital files, copiers make copies, record metadata of files Telephone: GPS, trackable, recordable, micropohone, imaging system. wirelines rarely used. Snail Mail: every parcel is imaged digitally Cafe, walks, parks: CCTV on every streetcorner, remote acees to all wireless devices Driving: Licenseplate scans (passive) of interstate traffic

MOSAIC.

I agree, but I'd also like to add a more specific cause to this idea. Like you say, technical measures aren't a bad idea either, but only drag things on.

My political view is this: both the right to communicate and the privacy of communications need to be treated as a fundamental human rights, just as freedom of speech is currently treated.

Then there are subjective measures. Breaching these rights may be warranted in certain specific situations (just as free speech is), but the current processes don't seem to go far enough to protect us. Even freedom of speech seems to have been curtailed too far in recent years. We need to have the political will to push back on this. But this can only happen if, first, we add freedom of communications and privacy of communications to our list of fundamental human rights.

but in the us freedom of speech is not universally applied ie you employer can sack you for what you say for example

"oh maybe we should organize a union" or maybe "the NHS model is a good idea"

Any changes need to apply universally and not just to the government.

I don't think this matters. Since I'm advocating privacy of communications, you could arrange to use trusted third parties and encryption such that others would not know what you've been saying, or with whom you've been communicating. It's perfectly reasonable for an employer to monitor communications while on their premises, and it is generally illegal for them to wiretap your home without you knowing about it.

That is pretty much the definition of freedom of speech universally applied. You are free to say what you want and your employer is free to say things like "you're fired."

Freedom of speech != speech without consequence.

You would be fine with the Government throwing you in jail for what you said then.

By that argument the Weiße Rose in ww2 Germany had free speech but they still got beheaded for it.

the UNHC defination is "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Note the "without interference"!

You couldn't have setup a worse strawman. Congrats for making the jump straight from employee/employer relations to Nazis.

Governments throwing you in jail, intimidating you, or out right killing you all disrupt your right to free speech.

An employer exercising his free speech by firing you in no way prohibits your free speech. You can still tell everyone you want that you should form a union. No one is interfering to keep you from doing so.

Please tell me you don't actually equate those two scenarios.

consequences != interferences

Firing you for free speech is a serious chilling effect NO? did you not read the "Without Interference" part of article 19

Another example is the Chinese allowed protestors against the Olympics in special zones - they of course arrested them after - that is not free speech.

Possibly you ought to update the constitution in line with the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights like most of the first world countrys have.

It's funny you should mention the Nazis... have you ever tried to deny the Holocaust in Germany? Maybe publish anything glorifying the Nazi Party? If so, how did the German Government treat you?

But if your employer says "You are fired" he will need someone to replace you.

Most people don't know that in some jobs it takes half a year or an entire year of salary to train someone new to their new job until they start being productive to the company.

It is also something employers do not love to do, firing people is hard emotionally. Most of them are not sociopaths.

How do I know? I had been and I am "employer" myself.

We need technical tools to be able to communicate. If these tools are subverted, the political fight is harder to organize. So both go hand in hand.

They've been trying to subvert these tools worldwide especially after the Arab spring. Just google 'Smartphone kill switch' every government is lobbying handset manufacturers for one in order to prevent theft of devices so they can push a button and brick the device with a hardware backdoor, but of course that's not the real reason they want a kill switch for every phone in their country. They want it to blackout comms during social unrest.

Same reasons why the UK would want a powerful pf filter implemented by a Chinese corporation at every single one of their ISPs. It's not to block dirty pictures, it's to shut off everything during social unrest. If they just wanted to block porno they could do simple DNS censorship, but they dropped in serious filter controls.

Currently my country is looking into regulating all wi-fi APs. They already have a kill switch for phones and ISPs, now they want to make sure you can't even make an adhoc or mesh network for social unrest. Of course it isn't to kill communications, it's to prevent crime because some criminals broadcast MITM networks inside cafes, so we need sweeping regulations to stop them.

I wonder if it's more about influence and money beyond the politics. Bit more of an explanation in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243392

The two are not mutually exclusive and there is overlap.

Personally, I don't care whom is in office or how ostensibly benign they portray themselves to be during campaign cycles. Governments are large, uncoordinated, stupid animals capable of arbitrarily ruining people's lives when it's politically convenient.

PHK is wrong; You don't leave your doors unlocked because the mayor seems nice.

This, this, this.

You can't let yourselves lose a power war by wasting all your time losing tactical battles. It's a tragedy if we all spend any time trying to protect our LOLs and OMGs to-from each other. If you are working on means for tracking behavior and extracting value (monetary, political, etc.) you are doing something less good than you could be.

Don't get caught by rope-a-dope when you could just cut funding for all this. We don't need protection from 20 terrorists who can kill 3,000 people. We can deal with them together. Somehow (fear, greed, stupidity?) we've lost our collective front. We need a 'We' now.

When Bush and some war-nat-resource-industry profiteers stack the deck, it's awful, but expected. At least the actions are rational. At this point, it's pretty obvious (not that it hasn't been for 50+ years) that we have a problem. The organizations at the heart of this are willing to act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of US law. The political factions riding power act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of our law and founding documents.

Our government is not behaving towards the world or our own citizens in the way that inspired generations to come here to build a better life for themselves.

The baby boomers frittered everything away. Lazy asses. Now, it's time to make amends. It's time to FORK THE USs REPO!!!

We need a plan B. It may be that the citizens have already lost this power war. Certainly the reaction of the UK police to the uproar (if it's that) of the Miranda detention and the snarkiness of the White House Dep. Press Secretary about being informed says to me that they don't really care what we think. And if they don't care it's either because they know they don't have to care (because we're not powerful enough), or they can't care because they are getting even more pressure from the other side, the intelligence community (who are thus more powerful than we are.)

Yes, political pressure. But what if that doesn't work?

Sorry. The analogy breaks down. Once you fork a government, there really isn't a mechanism to submit a pull request.

Anyways... No, you don't work within the system. You can't move fast enough to grassroots the elimination of funding for CIA and NSA and ancillary groups within military and war contractors. Any amount of traction will fail since there would be an asymmetrical and tactical-heavy process. You will lose against the financial and political interests of the ruling class. If the financial and political ruling class sees such a crowning jewel get it, they will FTFO and see it as a portent for things closer to their own power. The intelligence groups are the necessary brain to the necessary brawn that keeps the geopolitics in line with their bottom line.

The chasm between rich and poor is getting so far in the US that this is the beginning... you can't trust the poor. There's too many of them!

The two fights don't conflict. In fact, they complement each other.

When all email is getting stored in plaintext on NSA computers, it's going to be hard to get the government to give up all that juicy data. Reduce the value of the data they're getting, and it's easier to reach a point where the political heat just isn't worth it to them.

At the same time, the political effort helps prevent new laws that make the technical solutions more difficult. And it helps encourage people to actually use our fancy technical solutions. If ever there were a time when we can get people on board with using crypto, it's now.

I think it's not the value of data should be reduced, it's the cost of access to the data should be increased. If it would be too expensive to watch everyone, they would naturally stop doing that.

They would just find more contractors eager to bill the increased expenses.

Or they would force even more backdoors into proprietary hardware than they do already. For all we know Intel and AMD could have microcode to sabotage RNG and they can already decrypt anything with ease using a skeleton key to predict the randomness.

I've always (probably very naively) hoped that competition keeps chip makers honest. If anyone does something naughty then their competitors would probably discover it while reverse engineering the other's product.

Now that I say that, it sounds even more naive than I previously thought. All bets are probably off.

This is exactly it, the government is waging a war of technological means just as fervently as one of political means. There's no reason at all to limit our confrontations to the political arenas.

So what are the political/social solutions? And particularly, what are those solutions that might be actionable by this audience?

Let's take a few things off the table first. Voting is out for obvious reasons. Same goes for holding up signs in an approved free speech area. The occupy protests were a bit more effective at least in raising awareness but didn't upset the system much. Violence is a no for me personally on ethical grounds and also because history has shown violent revolution to achieve nothing but swap one form of tyranny for another.

What has actually worked in the past? Some examples that come to mind are the fight for Indian independence, the US labor movement and the US civil rights movement. These were mostly non-violent movements that deeply disrupted the status quo and created somewhat lasting change. They offer lots of practical examples.

Basically, we need to organize and act in a way that makes it impossible for bully governments and corporations to transact business as usual. Until that happens, there is no leverage, no opening for change.

Here's an idea: let's start a tech workers union. Imagine what a large scale tech worker strike would do to the economy. Now imagine if we were to participate in a general strike with industrial workers.

It would be most advantageous to organize now, while we still have a privileged status within the system. Let's not rest on that status and accept it as the bribe it is.

Any takers?

Quoting myself from another thread — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242567

| One of the tactical mistake is not to "name" people on the other side this asymmetric warfare against the world police states, and put the individuals in the spotlight. The of agencies and governments is abstract and non-tangible. Unlike the "Snowdens, Mannings, Greenwalds and Mirandas" they do not have fear, and hence accountability.

| At the end of the day, these agencies are made of people, who make decisions. While the aim should be to keep the 'agencies' under check, the general population resisting them need to target (and I do not mean attack their home or family members or something like that, I only mean to put the individuals under the spotlight) to "name and shame" the entity with feelings, family, emotions, weaknesses etc. under scrutiny. Just as the Snowdens and the greenwalds choices come with with the consequences, so should be the case for the british officials who chose to take a stand.

Email is inherently insecure and leaks all sorts of data even when the message content is encrypted to not just the government but everyone the message passes through on its way to the destination. This is a technical flaw.

The ability of the government to warrantlessly look at it is a political flaw and should also be corrected, but that doesn't mean the technical flaws should also be corrected.

Won't work.

If you want a technological solution to the problem, use lavabit... I understand they offer a secure, encrypted (and reasonably convenient and usable) email service.

You are joking right? They closed the service because of the NSA

He's in a different time zone.

Pretty sure he was pointing out that politics often trumps technology, though Lavabit isn't as good of a technical solution as it could have been.

> They closed the service because of the NSA

Thus making my actual point, that technological solutions will not resolve the problem.

The Direct Project is an email encryption scheme that hopes to replace the mail and fax currently used by American physicians to communicate patient health information. It is a requirement for Stage 2 (2014) Meaningful Use certified EHR software. So this is going to be adopted on a large scale in the next year or two.

It uses SMTP to transmit SMIME messages signed with X.509. Public keys for recipients are discovered either via DNS (as a CERT record) or via LDAP. Those discovered certificates are only trusted if the two parties have previously exchanged a trust anchor.

Direct itself does not define how trust relationships are initiated (which is a problem with scalability). So infrastructure is being formed around the protocol - such as HISPs and Trust Communities. HISPs intend to operate similar to how email providers operate - by providing web portals and edge protocols. Trust Communities are intended to create bundles of trust anchors for companies that have passed as certain level of accreditation.

There are currently two fully functional open source Reference Implementations in Java and C#.

http://directproject.org/

http://wiki.directproject.org/

http://wiki.directproject.org/Reference+Implementation+Workg...

One of the mechanisms for relationship building is Blue Button+[1]

We have a version of the java reference implementation up and running, so I can vouch for it. I have been thinking about it in context of the privacy atmosphere for quite a while now. On one hand I'm excited that such a technology could also be used for secure communication and on the other I'm worried that health records will be susceptible to the same coercion.

[1] https://secure.bluebuttontrust.org/

Agreed. Also, ONC has endorsed Direct Trust which has an accreditation process which will likely consolidate providers into HISPs, which will make easy targets for same coercion you speak of.

But a slightly altered system where private keys are not consolidated might be a huge improvement.

Any centralized service can be ordered to hand over encrypted material or to implement a backdoor, similar to Lavabit case. Bitmessage could be one possible type of solution. That way the only way to compromise the message (assuming it is as safe as bitcoin, not claiming bitmessage is) would be to compromise the sender or the receiver, both is much more secure than any email service. And they could not make any backdoors, because the code is opensource and changes would be visible. If they would make some of the clients with some kind of backdoor, others, without backdoor, could possibly not accept their messages, so the 51% attack would be vulnerability.

The problem with P2P is that you need "Ps" online at the same time in order to exchange data. One of the elements that allowed for the email revolution was the asynchronous nature of exchanges: I'll send an email now and you'll receive it whenever you're online. Requiring coordination is a non-starter.

Personally, as long as the encryption was entirely done client-side with opensource tools, and done properly (i.e. not involving keys stored on the actual server), I wouldn't mind making my messages go through hostile servers. Of course the NSA might be able to dedicate enough resources to break them, but they wouldn't have enough to break everyone's messages at the same time. If global surveillance were only possible with a two/three-year timelapse, that'd be a good enough window in most cases.

Have you read the Bitmessage paper?

You can receive a message whenever you're online. The encrypted message is broadcast to a lot of people, at least one of them should be online when you go online.

Bitmessage is not the solution. If you tell me your address (and related public key), it can just be modified on the wire to MITM the communication. There's no getting around that.

It makes me wonder - is the NSA "winning"? It seems so.

The NSA is the wrong unit of analysis. The NSA is a tool. The group of people that has disproportionate power over the government wins everytime anyone that opposes the status quo supported by that faction is intimidated into stopping a part of their work which focuses opposition to some piece of that status quo, though.

The way they are winning is the problem - which is that they get tax money. People need to be able to directly agree what their tax is spent on - on a per-item basis. New road? Fix up a certain road? Etc..

The people that have disproportionate power over government also have disproportionate wealth, and would not be weakened by a system of the type you present (which would just make it harder for government to serve diffuse interests.)

It would be a good start though I believe.

We have rebooted mail, see Freemail[0] and I2PBote[1].

[0] http://freenetproject.org/freemail.html

[1] http://i2pbote.i2p.us/

I think we need to go one step further than encryption.

We need to encrypt all communications expensively. Make algorithms which can be tuned to be arbitrarily expensive, computation-wise. Tune them so that it takes as much time as we can bear to encrypt and decrypt an email. Seconds, ideally.

The goal is to make it so that some large fraction of our computational resources are taken up encrypting and decrypting communications. Say, 10 or 20%. For every day uses this will just show up as emails being slow to open, since most people's computers are idle most of the time. But if your goal is to intercept and process all communications, all of the time, you can't do it without having an absurd level of computational resources at your disposal, even if you have all of the secret keys. Ten or twenty Google's worth of data centers.

If this was done properly, it would kill (free) webmail search. It wouldn't prevent targeted snooping, except insomuch as normal encryption does, but it could make pervasive snooping too expensive to be feasible.

Historically speaking, the US Government is pretty damn good at winning wars of attrition. Don't think you're going to find any amount of money that Congress won't happily hand to the military-industrial complex. They'll spend whatever it takes.

then the people need to keep voting new people into office until the politicians GET IT.

Does this apply to Viet Nam, and Mission Accomplished?

Breaking cryptography doesn't require sending people's children to die, giving people PTSD, or otherwise angering a significant portion of the US population. If anything, it creates good middle-class jobs.

Imagine how much computing power the US fighter jet program's budget could buy.

Buying two to three years will be enough in the average case.

Targeted individual surveillance will likely always be possible (not just because of encryption, but because of the 5$ wrench, trojans and so on). What we need is to make global, indiscriminate and realtime surveillance computationally unfeasible.

Three years from now, most commercially-sensitive, politically-embarrassing, or otherwise-newsworthy material, will likely be obsolete.

Honestly I'm not sure who would win.

One estimate I found was that there 150 million iPhone 5's shipped in the first year, and each one was about 25 GFlops. If 1% of that CPU was spent encrypting & decrypting communications to and from the iPhones, that is about 37,500 TFlops, which is just over the Rmax listed for the top supercomputer, Tianhe-2. Some numbers for the cost of that supercomputer are around $100 million, but the estimated cost for the Xeon Phis alone could be as high as $250 million. Giving the defenders the advantage, let's round up to $1 billion.

So the NSA needs to spend $1 billion per year to counteract the top smartphone in the world. Their budget is estimated to be as high as $10 billion / year, so they could do it. But how much of the total pie are iPhone 5's? I think to be competitive we need to push the cost to the NSA up towards $30 or $100 billion per year. $1 billion is trivial, $10 billion Congress will swallow and move on. They still fund NASA to the tune of $16 billion, and no one in Congress even cares about NASA anymore. But $100 billion per year, then you're talking real money.

So what fraction of total personal computer sales are iPhone 5's? If they're 10%, we'll be hard-pressed to keep the NSA out of the game. If they're 1% of personal computer sales, I think we have a chance of keeping ahead of them.

Current estimated total cost for just one of many fighter jet programs (F-35 joint strike fighter): $397 billion. That's when we're barely making noise about something that unequivocally provides no national security benefit unless we're planning on aerial dogfighting like it's WWI. There are dozens of similarly useless or near-useless defense spending programs, like the tanks the Army keeps saying it doesn't want.

Imagine what we could spend on an actual threat.

That's $397 billion over many years; I am suggesting a target of $100 billion per year.

That's not to say we couldn't or wouldn't spend in excess of $100 billion per year on a boondoggle. We've done it before and we'll do it again. But I think $100 billion is the point at which money even becomes an issue. $1 or $10 billion and there's barely a point in trying.

> Historically speaking, the US Government is pretty damn good at winning wars of attrition.

Unless you are speaking in some kind of figurative sense where I'm missing the metaphor, this isn't really true. The few real wars of attrition where the US has been on the winning side (WWI comes to mind) it "won" by joining late when the other side (as well as its allies) had already suffered considerable attrition. But even in those circumstances, its record in wars of attrition isn't that great (the US portion of the extended colonial conflict in Indochina comes to mind.)

Yeah it was an unfortunate phrasing. I meant as far as outspending an enemy (i.e. the USSR) to match/exceed technological capabilities.

Which is funny, because that's the idea behind bitcoin, you get 'money' because you did work.

The weird thing of course is that the work is completely 'useless'

The purpose of the hashing work in bitcoin is to solve the Two Generals Problem. The purpose of widespread expensive encryption of emails is to make routine decryption impractical. Two different problems, which don't have much in common besides having a solution involving computers doing work.

If you hold assets in US dollars, or generally speaking use commodities and have a currency bound to the dollar in any way, they're consuming your wealth to keep up with that arbitrary increase of cost on computation. That means, you can never outlast them or win a war of attrition. They have your bank account via deficit financing (or taxes optionally). The only reason we have such a massive military + intelligence system to begin with is they can use inflationary means for financing it all (aka steal your purchasing power).

There's only one successful way to fight this: change the culture and change the politics.

Technical approaches are fine for shielding you today. At the rate the police state is accelerating, it's very unlikely to shield you tomorrow, as they're going to outlaw the means of shielding. They will not allow an arms race, they'll use their legal powers to shut it down, and make you a criminal.

"There's only one successful way to fight this: change the culture and change the politics."

Not going to happen short of a mass global natural disaster or mass military takeover changing the stakes. There's too much power concentrated at the top and no good reason for the people there to surrender any of it. If the masses get too persistent, they will "cull" the masses through whatever means...

This seems like a legitimate use case for an FPGA in every PC. Implement a set of expensive algorithms in Verilog, put it up on Github and set up some slick distribution mechanism that updates the logic when needed without bothering non-technical users with it. This would prevent the crypto from using up too much general purpose processing resources, cause it to be acceptably fast and provide a mechanism for updating the algorithms when flaws are found or new algorithms are introduced. Downside is that it would probably take up to a decade to actually be adopted by the majority of PC users, but then again, the majority of PC users will probably not care too much.

And NSA will just have to buy one of these for each PC sold. And when buying in such bulk the devices will be times cheaper than what comes to the user.

And for 4 billion USD they could create their own foundry. And then costs begin to plummet once again.

> set up some slick distribution mechanism that updates the logic when needed without bothering non-technical users with it.

You'll need to make sure that those responsible to signing the updates are resistant to coercion. The best bet there is probably a moderately large number of somewhat anonymous signers. Have a large and diverse pool of signers and require every update to have some portion of the signers sign off on it before the releases are accepted. With any luck if doors start getting kicked in and signers start getting hit with wrenches, at least one of them will be able to warn the public.

I agree this is a good idea but I think using the words "encrypt" and "decrypt" confuses the goal a little bit as this idea is still useful even if the message aren't required to be confidential form anyone. I think "encapsule" and "release" describe it better. These operations can be used in combination with encrypt and decrypt if encryption is needed.

That's sort of an interesting idea. Of course without the key it's always absurdly difficult to decrypt...but if we're worried about them intercepting keys, this could make life harder for them.

BitMessage is a reboot: https://bitmessage.org/

Fully decentralized, based on the idea behind bitcoin.

We are at an interesting juncture of history. It seems like Snowden has accomplished what he set out do to: raise awareness of government abuse and bring about positive change. Initial fears after the NSA leaks seemed to be that the public would become outraged and then forget about it. Clearly, this is not happening. A more secure Internet is needed, and instances like this highlight that necessity.

weirdly enough, I think the public would have forgotten about it, but establishment leaders seem bent on doing everything they can to keep the story alive (lying to Congress, grounding Morales' plane, forcing Snowden to defect to Russia, harassing journalists, now even attacking their families...).

The Streisand Effect is a concept that some people apparently do not understand until they have experienced the full force of the Effect first-hand.

Edit: grammar

That's the most bizarre part.

First, Snowden steals his information from a Microsoft Sharepoint server? What are classified documents doing on a Sharepoint server? What is a Sharepoint server doing inside the network boundary at NSA?

Next, they blew the recovery. If they negotiated with Snowden when he was in Hong Kong, they could have had him stand trial in Hawaii and won easily. Or alternatively, they could have done nothing and waited for Snowden to settle down anonymously in some Hong Kong apartment and arranged for an extraordinary rendition, most likely with the tacit blessing of Hong Kong authorities.

Instead we've had this wild goose chase across the world, including the surreal scene of Snowden stuck in the Moscow International Airport, with Vladimir Putin claiming that Moscow Airport isn't part of Russia.

Now, they're going to harass a journalist? The US press, which normally handles national security issues in close consultation with US authorities, is clearly spooked, with front page stories in both WSJ and NYT. There's an old adage: never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

The general public, which didn't care, is now bombarded by increasingly fantastical news stories with just enough entertainment juice to keep them interesting: super-spies reading your email, a lone hacker with a model for a girlfriend fleeing Hawaii to galavant around the world, and the invincible United States seemingly flummoxed at every turn.

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but what the fuck guys? Have we really never considered how to exfil someone from a hostile nation?

Is this really the best our intelligence community can do? If so, the real danger is less 1984 and more kindergarten cops. Maybe the story is more complex from the inside, but if not, this is being botched from end to end.

Virtually everything run by the government is to some extent botched. I can't think of a single department that is run properly, yet so many people claim the NSA knows everything. Sure they do.

You're missing the point and actually reinforcing the issue against the NSA: The NSA is already botching the whole damn thing - but WHAT they are botching is the fact that they alreday setup the infra to slurp all data. They farked up setting up controls that would prevent something like Snowden (thankfully) and what we are seeing is that they took IMMENSE technical power and are using it against everyone - the fact that they botched up the human aspect is, as you imply, inevitable. But they still have succeeded in getting the infra in place.

Certain agencies within the military run very well (JSOC and Army Corps of Engineers come to mind.) On the civilian side, NRC, OMB, NSF, Department of State. NSA under Alexander is also very well run after the post 9/11 binge abated.

The recovery efforts for Snowden are probably coming out of White House, DoD CSS, CIA, and FBI. Not wild about their performance here.

The public by and large has forgotten it, hell the public hardly became outraged before they forgot it. This and Lavabit and basically preaching to the choir.

The only difference between this and me saying I'm going to stop using email and drop off the internet would be that my statement won't generate several threads on HN. It would, however, have the same effect. Those that already know will ask why, and the rest of the world will go on oblivious.

Considering that Snowden's first revelation was just this June, I think a lot has happened in a few short months. Public opinion takes time to build. This is not a one-time event to be forgotten. This is a crack in the very foundation of our er... society, or whatever. The bill to reign in the NSA almost passed remember? That's just after a few months from the initial revelation. I will bet that by this time next year, things will look very different.

> I will bet that by this time next year, things will look very different.

I'll take you up on that bet, assuming you believe it's going to get better. I believe the only way you'll win it is if you mean looking very different to include worse instead of the implied better you wrote.

The majority don't care. Of the minority that even pay attention to it, most of them support it to catch the evil terrorists.

The public by and large has forgotten it, hell the public hardly became outraged before they forgot it.

Expecting the public to be instantly outraged by an injustice is like expecting customers to instantly understand your startup. Sure, your product is awesome, your ideas are great, and you know how to execute. But you still have a long uphill slog ahead of you before people will start giving you money. The vast majority of your market will only buy once they see lots of other people buying.

Similarly, the average person will only get upset about the NSA when they see lots of other people getting upset. A successful political movement involves winning over one influencer at a time, as the evidence slowly builds up. The Watergate scandals took a good two years to play out. Successful anti-war movements have sometimes taken half a decade.

Politics has a surprising amount of momentum. If you want to change something, you may need to spend years exerting a relatively tiny force on a huge object. And like a startup, you need to lay lots of groundwork so that you can take advantage of lucky opportunities.

> It seems like Snowden has accomplished what he set out do to: raise awareness of government abuse and bring about positive change.

On a tangent--I have to say, this has been a weird era.

It was started by a small group of people who decided to kick Americans into a state of fear and panic--Bin Laden et al--and they succeeded, wildly. And it might be ended by one man, who decided to kick Americans into a state of suspicion that their fear and panic has been used against them.

It feels a bit mythical, individual heroes and villains swaying the fates of nations like this. Politics isn't supposed to be this neat and tidy, is it? Things like this are only supposed to exist when you revise history to make the lines less muddy. And yet, here we are.

With Bin Laden some of the fear and panic did come from our not being used to such things, but a lot of it also came from our government's overreaction. Which seems to have been at least partly pre-planned and just waiting for an opportunity.

With Snowden, things have been getting more and more absurd and someone was bound to point it out with credible evidence sooner or later.

Politics isn't supposed to be this neat and tidy, is it? Things like this are only supposed to exist when you revise history to make the lines less muddy.

World War I was set off by one guy assassinating one other guy. But, it wouldn't have really mattered if everyone wasn't already this -->.<-- close to breaking out in war anyway.

Politics isn't neat and tidy, and there will always be events that hit at the right time to have outsized effects. And a lot of times, those events will have some visible individual playing a key role.

> It seems like Snowden has accomplished what he set out do to: raise awareness of government abuse and bring about positive change.

While I see some raised awareness, most of the change I'm seeing is that the raised awareness is making the government more successful in intimidating those who aren't actively supporting the status quo into hiding under a rock and not engaging in (or facilitating) mass communication.

While this might be a momentary transition on the way to actual positive change, I think it is naively optimistic to assume that it must be a sign that positive change is in progress.

> A more secure Internet is needed

By using the passive voice, who are you suggesting comes along to "Secure" the internet? Surely not the same government that brought us the NSA?

Huh? I just don't follow. Groklaw is not a site that depends on anonymous tips. The last few stories posted on Groklaw were on Apple vs Samsung and did not appear to require privileged confidential information.

How is it that other groups that do directly go against the government, such as the ACLU and the EFF, continue to do so without a paralyzingly fear that they can't keep their communications secret? The logical implication from Pamela's opinion is that these groups, by continuing to operate, are little more than a honeypot to be used against their clients.

That seems a bit overboard in defeatism.

It doesn't depend on anonymous tips, but encourages them.

PJ is basically saying she wants to prevent folks from sending her honest questions about things they have done or are involved from admitting guilt to law enforcement who can read everything.

Make sense, but I still think it's an overreaction. My original question still stands (is it irresponsible for the EFF/ACLU/etc to continue to operate with an online mailbox?), and I would also argue that PJ could mitigate this by simply removing any contact form or information from her site. Yes, people who know her email can still contact her anyway but obviously, that means they can already do that after the site is shut down. Groklaw could continue to operate as an outspoken advocate for legal freedom...perhaps Glenn Greenwald will find himself in a similar position, in which all communication to him is expected to be compromised, but I'd still think he'd continue to do his reporting and writing even if his sourcing was scarce.

>is it irresponsible for the EFF/ACLU/etc to continue to operate with an online mailbox?

It's actually fairly dangerous, knowing what we know now.

There is a reason the powers that be are so rattled by these revelations: the tactical advantage they're currently enjoying is huge.

>Huh? I just don't follow. Groklaw is not a site that depends on anonymous tips. The last few stories posted on Groklaw were on Apple vs Samsung and did not appear to require privileged confidential information.

It sounds more like the situation is about pj's personal feelings in general than only related to the site specifically. She doesn't feel comfortable communicating in an environment where the government is tracking everything you say and do, and is thus removing herself from that environment.

Why not use DeadDrop[0] for leads/sources? The New Yorker[1] seems to be the only notable publication using it.

PJ has shutdown before, I'm sure she'll be back again.

[0] https://github.com/deaddrop/deaddrop [1] http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/

PJ's (final) entry explaining why:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

EDIT: Turns out there's another thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242569

This is kind of silly. Just move the site offshore, and if you really have to get rid of email, have an SSL message form. Although I think there are good solutions for PGP and whatnot with email that encrypts it client side anyway.

I think this person is just technically illiterate and doesn't understand. Pretty strange. I have a wife from China who hates tech, but she knows very well how to use an encrypted VPN to protect her communications and says it is common knowledge there.

This person seems to be lacking even US level common knowledge about protecting your information.

You seem to have missed the point. One shouldn't have to do those things to protect themselves from their own government.

Something to keep in mind:

Privacy International criticised the climate that had led to Jones's decision. "The closing of Groklaw demonstrates how central the right to privacy is to free expression. The mere threat of surveillance is enough to [make people] self-censor", it said in a statement.

Now more than ever is when we need sites like this. This all plays right into the government's hands. They may as well keep it up because people are self-censoring and that makes their jobs easier.

If one person does it, it's self-censorship. If a group of people do it's a non-violent collective action protest.

These are in no way a "protest". Once a site shuts down, that's it, there is no message / discussion / fight, and it just blends into the background radiation a day later.

Continuing the site would benefit the "protest" infinitely more. And the operators probably know this on some level.

And that's the real story here -

These sites are shutting down because 1) it was unprofitable, 2) it was a time-sink, and 3) now there is an excuse to get out and move on with their lives and businesses.

*I'm not blaming them - and I'm not saying it's anything above the subconscious level. I'd probably do the same.

I have a counter-current question (and I feel that this should be a legitimate site for asking such questions, because we are all hackers here).

Were lavabit, groklaw profitable and/or widely popular?

Is it possible that these are sites that are not profitable and would have been shutdown anyway but which are now using privacy as an excuse for shutting down?

This does not excuse the misuse of governmental powers, but if it is true, it is a distraction (and a cynical manipulation of our views).

iirc the lavabit guy was making 100k a year.

Or, put another way, there were likely a confluence of factors that led to security/surveillance (ostensibly) being the "straw that broke the camel's back"—the latest development that took the risk/reward level over the owner's threshold.

How close they were to that threshold anyway, what other factors were in play, whether the perceived threat was evaluated realistically, and other questions are reasonable to ask.

I hadn't heard of Lavabit before they shuttered themselves. I had visited Grokalaw on several occasions (often via HN), but have no idea of its profitability or alignment with its authors goals.

Groklaw was widely popular a few years ago; this is the most attention they've got in years. Since they've basically never covered anything secret in their entire existence, and PJ has apparently done ethically questionable things in the past to keep attention on herself, pardon me if I'm a bit suspicious about this. (For example, she supposedly shadowbanned not just commenters who disagreed with her, but supporters who were becoming popular and effective enough to compete with her, along with anyone who mentioned this.)

While I'm not a fan of the recent direction of Groklaw (probably irrelevant now), I think it is a stretch to claim that PJ has done ethically questionable things without some citations. What things?

I call bullshit.

It's almost impossible to argue that the public benefit of Groklaw is outweighed by the risk of the site receiving emails that will be exposed. Using the same position, every site on the internet should should shut down, people should stop sending all postal mail, using phones, and we should all go live in caves. This is really signaling surrender to the anti-freedom terrorists who occupy our national security department, and I think it's counterproductive.

If I'd had to guess, Pamela was ready to stop publishing Groklaw and wanted to go out making a big statement about a major threat to our future. I can thank her for that, though I think the message is somewhat muddied by the grandstanding defeatism.

One of the Internet's very best :( At this point I hope more follow. If anything that's one way to make a stand. We just need one country/countries to make a stand and allow security friendly regulation and start-ups will flock. Unfortunately it seems no country at this point could guarantee it and be strong enough to not succumb to pressure.

I just want to say that everytime a site like Groklaw -- whose main work was revealing how broken the status quo is (mostly with regard to tech IP law, in Groklaw's case) and thereby creating pressure or exchange among interested parties to fix it -- shuts down, for whatever reason, the powers-that-be win.

Groklaw's main work wasn't revealing how broken tech IP law was, it was revealing how stupid one company was for trying to manipulate the system. In the SCO vs. IBM case, I'd say that the system worked pretty well. Coverage of which didn't really include much (any?) help from confidential sources.

> Groklaw's main work wasn't revealing how broken tech IP law was, it was revealing how stupid one company was for trying to manipulate the system.

That was its founding purpose, to be sure, but its main work had moved on from the "how stupid one company was" thing for quite some time.

> Coverage of which didn't really include much (any?) help from confidential sources.

I'm not sure why this is in your response to my comment, since it is completely irrelevant to it.

I haven't visited Groklaw in a long time, and I suspect that many other have the same habits. After SCO, I wonder what their readership numbers have been. They will always be associated with that trial.

The reason why their lack of confidential sources is relevant is that closing up Groklaw because of the NSA doesn't make sense. Their sources were largely from law filings and (very good) analysis. Closing up shop because their email could be snooped just doesn't make sense.

There could be other, valid, reasons, but this just doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps PJ wants to get off the Internet because of the NSA, and I'd buy that. But it just didn't seem like protecting the email of confidential sources was that central to their operation.

Also, it doesn't seem like the NYT or other major newspapers are closing up shop. There are other ways to get confidential information other than email, if you are truly concerned by the NSA.

well, if this keeps up, the NSA won't have much internet to snoop. I think that these politicians need to stop taking months off and get some shit done.

The masses will always use the internet, and they're the real targets. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter won't be shutting down anytime soon.

Given the current furore I think it not unlikely that pj is under a national security letter and dare not talk about it for fear of arrest.

She is probably gambling that they will not threaten to arrest her for closing her site if she makes no statement.

She always seemed pretty ballsy and I think she still is.

Or maybe she just doesn't want to be a journalist in America any more.

What do whistleblowers seek ? A journalist to leak to.

Imagine receiving a leak in America right now.

It would certainly be a BIG commitment and having received it, it might be too late to undo that action.

At the very least this is pre-emptive censorship - a chilling effect, but important in the Manufacturing of Consent.

What do you think would happern to Glen Greenwald if he were to step into a transit lounge right now ?

Nice of the White House to deny it.

Consent for what ? Well one might wonder...

I am very sad about Groklaw closing, but I understand perfectly how pj feels.

This is a sad day.

Hmm. A lot of people supposedly operated under the belief that an omnipotent, judgmental entity was watching their every move, in its own interests, to decide their eternal fate.

Turns out, a nearly omnipotent judgmental entity is watching a big handful of things, working in your interest, only looking for terrorism and national threats.

Suddenly faced with this kind of thing as a reality instead of just paying lip service to the idea, a lot of people... don't like it.

Here is a simple idea. Make it known that our top election issue is removing the NSA's (and others) tentacles from our daily lives. In addition we, the tech elite, will freely help candidates who share point of view and refuse to work with those that don't.

The last election showed how important IT systems are. And while it may take a few election cycles we can certainly use that to our advantage.

Thoughts?

The chilling effects of the surveillance state.

So how we we achieve political change? As Charlie Stross points out, some very wrong has hijacked our political system:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders...

I think this might be part of a long term legal strategy to gain standing in order to sue. I'm sure a bright lawyer will be able to raise 1st and 4th Amendment issues and maybe even some takings claims. Lavabit and Groklaw would make great plaintiffs in a federal court case. Here's hoping.

We need a whistleblower law.

A good one, like one that is embedded in the consitution that protects people from speaking out.

It would never work. No whistleblower was ever thanked or benefitted from their actions.

The only way to survive as a whistleblower is to be anonymous, cover your tracks, leave the organisation, leak credible information with evidence to the right people who will do the right thing with it. Protect your identity at all times.

We already have one. It means nothing.

http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/

Scroll down to: Protect Whistleblowers

Against a lawless executive, this would accomplish exactly what???

> We need a whistleblower law [...] that is embedded in the consitution that protects people from speaking out.

Already got one: Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

What we lack, if anything, is a public willing to hold the government accountable to the existing rule "embedded in the Constitution".

Adding more words to the Constitution won't fix that.

Fear. Shame. Doubt. These are the means by which the few control the many.

To be truly free, one first shed fear and shame. To free yourself from the powers of the few, you first have to step away from the social control of the many. This social control comes from peers ratting each other out. It's conditioning designed into modern, industrial education. Since the many are busy watching each other, the few can step back, secure in knowing that the web of social fear and shame will keep people in line. (This web of fear and shame is what we're building our "social networks" out of).

So the first step is free yourself from your own fears and shame.

You free yourself from fear by accepting the possibility of what you fear. Then you tune into the experience of fear itself, and let it go. People stay afraid because they don't want to tune into the specific emotion of fear. Where are you experiencing fear in your body? Is it tension in your chest? Is something sharp in your gut? Is it a tremor on your back? If it feels uncomfortable, then you're on the right track. Truth is hidden within the things we don't want to see.

You free yourself from shame by letting go of pride. When you have no pride, you have no shame. When you have no shame, then you can act impeccably. This is also called acting with integrity.

It's only when you let go of fear and shame that compassion can open up. Most people's notion of compassion are really driven by fear, shame, and guilt. That's not compassion, merely co-dependency. I appease your fear, and you don't mention my shame, and we'll get along just fine. We'll even call it being "nice."

If you want to change the world, first change yourself. Instead of fighting for power, own the power over yourself.

Do you own your fears, or do your fears own you?

Why can't Groklaw use GPG?

I understand that it's too complicated for my grandparents, but this is exactly the community that'd be willing to put up with a slight inconvenience to gain security.

It makes you wonder what people like Qmail's D. J. Bernstein, make of all this, a self confessed cryptography expert with a hand in a widely used mail transfer agent.

Does that Groklaw logo on the Guardian have a CafePress watermark in the background?

This is not surprising since "pj" guards his privacy and anonymity. Two things the surveillance state doesn't want you to have.

> This is not surprising since "pj" guards his privacy and anonymity.

"Her". Pamela is a woman.

On wikipedia there is a quote, "I chose PJ, because it could be anyone, either sex, any nationality, anyone and no one in particular." Pointing out her sex, you're just being a jackass and for what?

will this also lead to a mass exodus in HN users? given the ferocious posting in these threads will all those now also go offline?

will yc now only finance startups that deal with encryption and freedom rather than the next social/local/sticker thing? will elon musk create the hyperloop for freedom?

Just out of curiosity: What interest could the NSA possibly have in Groklaw mails?

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/316445-d...

The Justice Department on Friday released its legal rationale for why all U.S. phone calls are "relevant" to terrorism investigations.

Same applies to emails. You may not know it, but USDOJ thinks your emails - all of them, including github commit notifications - are relevant for terrorism investigations. Because they can. Remember - "yes, we can!"? You've been warned. Did you listen?

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