Having one of your 27-year-old SEs eagerly working alongside Barr to move a deal forward has bad optics. But believing that Glenn Greenwald should be thwarted is an opinion that, while obviously objectionable on HN, not actually unethical.
"believing that Glenn Greenwald should be thwarted is an opinion that, while obviously objectionable on HN, not actually unethical."
Are you trying to say that an employee for NSA contractor Palantir discussing targeting a journalist because of his work on a topic is separate from the employee's beliefs, therefore is not actually unethical?
How exactly did the journalist, or his career get brought up in a conversation between federal contractors about solicitation for work again? Was it to talk about of the reports they liked from him?
Now, some important caveats:
(1) It is obviously possible to unethically thwart any writer's agenda. Publishing things you know to be untrue, even in the service of what you believe is a higher truth, is unethical; it's exactly what someone might accuse Greenwald of having done. For that matter, invading Greenwald's privacy by, I don't know, stealing his bank records would also be deeply unethical. But Palantir hasn't been accused of either of these, or, for that matter, anything else unethical w/r/t Greenwald. Feel free to enlighten me here.
(2) If you can't tell, I'm not a major Greenwald fan. Having said that, I also believe the best antidote for bad speech is good speech, so orchestrating a campaign to suppress him doesn't seem like a good strategy to me. It apparently sounded like a good idea to one of Palantir's SEs, which ended up getting the guy fired.
GMail is not secure against the NSA or even a state judge's warrant. That has numerous advantages for society but regardless it's not and never will be secure against government orders. That's never been its design. Levinson's service was secure against them for certain clients.
The reason the anti-NSA crowd is intrigued by him is the same reason sources told their secrets to Bob Woodward. He proved willing to protect Deep Throat's identity despite immense effort to out it. Similarly Levinson was willing to risk his business and contempt proceedings to protect Snowden.
The government's wiretap order and the subsequent contempt proceedings suggests that despite the technical problems of Lavabit, the government did not get the data they sought. Had Snowden used GMail, do you believe the government would have received the information they sought?
This isn't security in the sense you'd use it in an audit. It's just a design decision. In the vernacular, designs that permit the release of private information are sometimes called insecure.
Weren't the people trying to (order people to) thwart him in the best position to know whether details were actually made up?
Unless a service enables you to put your data really truly out of reach of any demand for it, those NSA slides about which companies are part of the Prism program are probably an accurate list of companies enabling dragnet surveillance.