Secrets, lies and Snowden's email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit

theguardian.com

62 points·room271··6 comments

I'm surprised this isn't getting more traction on Hacker News. It's blowing up on r/technology. Pretty surprising to see the mum reaction here. I was hoping to get some more insight into the legal aspects of what happened here. Also, the U.S. is devolving into a tyranny. Sadly, Plato surmised that all democracies eventually devolve into tyrannies. Seems to be coming true.

Sadly, I think hacker news is dominated by the profit motive over the motive of a common good. Even the libertarians here seem to be focused on the liberty to become wealthy free of regulation. I expect this comment to get down voted, even though it is a legit criticism, just as my questioning the morality of ad-supported websites[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733713

This article seems to be leaving out a lot of details which have been discussed many times previously on this site. Mainly with not complying with the specific narrow warrants for individual users, dumbing down the encryption and allowing user emails to be decrypted by admins in the first place, faxing over encryption keys vs. supplying them digitally, and other antagonizing things which required the government to broaden their request(s) for access.

Hacker News automatically downvotes/weighs down anything to do with the NSA, Snowden, and other keywords. I guess it's just not that important.

Surely there should be something you can do to challenge an unconstitutional court order, or when you think an unusual court order is interpreted in an unconstitutional way. But how do you challenge that? Can you challenge a court order at all?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to have done exactly that in this case:

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-has-lavabits-back-con...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com