Originally posted by ConSigCor:
My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations....

Silent Circle shuttered its encrypted e-mail service on Thursday, the second such closure in just a few hours in an apparent attempt to avoid government scrutiny that may threaten its customers' privacy.

Silent Circle, which makes software that encrypts phone calls and other communications, announced in a company blog post that it could "see the writing on the wall" and decided it best to shut down its Silent Mail feature. The company said it was inspired by the closure earlier Thursday of Lavabit, another encrypted e-mail service provider that alluded to a possible national security investigation.
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"We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now," the company explained in its post. "We'd considered phasing the service out, continuing service for existing customers, and a variety of other things up until today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your safety we decided that the worst decision is always no decision."

The company said it would continue to support its Silent Phone, Silent Text, and Silent Eyes teleconferencing platform, assuring users it collects no encrypted data or metadata about conversations.

"Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time is past," the company said....

Originally posted by ConSigCor:
John Galt anyone?

...The number of U.S. taxpayers renouncing citizenship or permanent-resident status surged to a record high in the second quarter, as new laws aimed at cracking down on overseas assets increase the cost of complying and the risk of a taxpayer misstep.

A total of 1,130 names appeared on the latest list of renunciations from the IRS, according to Andrew Mitchel, a tax lawyer in Centerbrook, Conn., who tracks the data. That is far above the previous high of 679, set in the first quarter, and more than were reported in all of 2012....

Originally posted by ConSigCor:
John Galt anyone?

Just once, I'd like to see a company tell the government to go to hell.

Originally posted by Imagrunt:
Tell fed.gov to go to hell, and they will bring you along for the ride.

Welcome to Neo-Fascism my fellow inmates.

Ladar Levison took 10 years to build his company—and he's 32, so that's most of his adult life. So when he shut down his encrypted e-mail service, Lavabit, without warning last week, it was like "putting a beloved pet to sleep."

"I was faced with the choice of watching it suffer, or putting it to sleep quietly... it was very difficult," he told Democracy Now. "I had to pick between the lesser of two evils."

What was that other choice? "Unfortunately, I can't talk about that," Levison said during today's interview. "I would like to, believe me. I think that if the American people knew what our government was doing, they wouldn't be allowed to do it anymore. My hope is that the media can uncover what's going on without my assistance," and pressure Congress, he said. Together with Lavabit's own efforts working through the court system, he hopes it can "put a cap on what the government is entitled to in terms of our private communications."

The Lavabit shut-down came just a few weeks after a human rights activist revealed that she was contacted by NSA leaker Edward Snowden using the service. Within 24 hours after Levison announced he was shutting down, another online security company, Silent Circle, turned off its encrypted e-mail service too.

Levison is speaking out about his decision to shut down the e-mail in the hopes that it puts some pressure on Congress to change the laws that put him in this situation to begin with. Levison is legally barred from saying much about what the government demanded from him, but even with that broad gag order in place, he has refused to keep quiet. He's at least determined to let people know that the gag is there and let inferences be drawn.

"There's information that I can't even share with my lawyer, let alone with the American public. So, if we're talking about secrecy, you know, it's really been taken to the extreme, and I think it's really being used by the current administration to cover up tactics that they may be ashamed of," he said.

His service was built "by geeks, for geeks" and has settled into serving a niche of users who are "very privacy-conscious and security-focused," Levison said. He continued:

The discussion was Levison's second in-depth talk about his decision to abruptly shut down the company he spent a decade building. He also spoke to Forbes about his company, which he founded with friends from Southern Methodist University in 2004 as a response to the Patriot Act.

Secure e-mail was his company's only product, so Levison is walking away from the $50,000 to $100,000 in annual revenue his company made. He has also abandoned his own e-mail account, which was shut down just like all 410,000 other users. "I’m taking a break from e-mail,” he told Forbes. "If you knew what I know about e-mail, you might not use it either."

Snowden himself praised Levison's decision as "inspiring." His response was relayed by Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who has published most of Snowden's leaked information:

Levison appeared on Democracy Now alongside his lawyer, Jesse Binnall, who made it clear that the reason for Levison's circumspection was dead serious: it was to keep him out of prison.

"The stakes are very high," said Binnall. "It's a very unfortunate situation that, as Americans, we really are not supposed to have to worry about. But Ladar ... has to watch every word he says when he's talking to the press for fear of being imprisoned. And we can't even talk about what the legal requirements are that makes it so he has to watch his words. But the simple fact is that I'm here with him only because there are some very fine lines that he can't cross for fear of being dragged away in handcuffs."

Levison is fighting it out at the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit—both for his right to tell his own story, and ultimately to "resurrect Lavabit as an American company." As of Saturday morning, just 48 hours after announcing the shutdown, the fund had raised $90,000, according to Forbes.

Democracy Now also featured Nicholas Merrill in today's show. Merrill, founder of the Calyx Institute, was the first person to challenge the gag order in a National Security Letter, one of thousands sent out by the FBI. It took six years of fighting for Merrill to get released from parts of the gag order and be allowed to even reveal that he was fighting it.

The saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order. The feds are apparently arguing that the act of shutting down the business, itself, was a violation of the order:

That same article suggests that the decision to shut down Lavabit was over something much bigger than just looking at one individual's information -- since it appears that Lavabit has cooperated in the past on such cases. Instead, the suggestion now is that the government was seeking a tap on all accounts:

It sounds like the feds were asking for a full on backdoor on the system, not unlike some previous reports of ISPs who have received surprise visits from the NSA.

Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

Pamela Jones shuts award-winning site, saying concerns that messages could be read mean that 'there is now no shield from forced exposure'


Charles Arthur
The Guardian, Tuesday 20 August 2013

The award-winning legal analysis site Groklaw is shutting because its founder says that "there is no way" to continue to run it without using secure email - and that the threat of NSA spying means that could be compromised.

"There is now no shield from forced exposure," writes the site's founder, Pamela Jones, an American paralegal who has run the site from its start in 2003, in a farewell message on the site.

Jones cites the revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) can capture any email, and can store encrypted email for up to five years, as having prompted her decision to shutter the site: "the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpont of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don't know how to do Groklaw like this," she writes.

The abrupt decision - which Jones had not hinted at in any previous article since the revelations about the extent of the NSA's surveillance first came out in June - shocked people.

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.

"Andrea", a core developer on the Tor project - which provides anonymous communication online - said on Twitter: "This is exactly how it begins - chilling effects accumulate until the few who still speak out are easy targets."

Jones cited the warning from the founder of the Lavabit encrypted email service, who earlier this month closed it down rather than comply with an NSA order, as being a key part of her decision. "There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend."

Groklaw relied in some cases on email tips from readers and other anonymous sources. Its name was meant to indicate that it would help people to "grok" - understand deeply - legal issues relating to technology law topics.

Posted at 2.40am EDT on Tuesday, Jones's move comes just hours after Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed that the UK government threatened court action to force the paper to surrender material it had obtained relating to UK and US surveillance. GCHQ experts monitored the destruction of computers and hard drives in the Guardian's offices.

On Groklaw, Jones writes: "I'm not a political person, by choice, and I must say, researching the latest developments convinced me of one thing -- I am right to avoid it." She says that her reasoning about the closedown is the risk of exposure for people sending her information: "They tell us that if you send or receive an email from outside the US, it will be read. If it's encrypted, they keep it for five years, presumably in the hopes of tech advancing to be able to decrypt it against your will and without your knowledge. Groklaw has readers all over the world."

Set up in May 2003, Groklaw first came to fame through its analysis of a case involving SCO, a technology company which claimed that the free Linux operating system infringed a number of patents that it owned.

More recently, it has focussed on the multiple patent fights being fought between Samsung and Apple, and was a vociferous critic of the jury deliberations in the Apple-Samsung legal case fought in California in which Apple was awarded $1bn in damages.

The site won a number of awards for blogging and was nominated a number of times for awards by organisations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Bar Administration.

Jones confirmed the move in a tweet from the Groklaw Twitter account: "This is the last Groklaw article. Thank you for all you've done. I will never forget you and our work together."

Our Mission

To bring the world our unique end-to-end encrypted protocol and architecture that is the 'next-generation' of private and secure email. As founding partners of The Dark Mail Alliance, both Silent Circle and Lavabit will work to bring other members into the alliance, assist them in implementing the new protocol and jointly work to proliferate the worlds first end-to-end encrypted 'Email 3.0' throughout the world's email providers. Our goal is to open source the protocol and architecture and help others implement this new technology to address privacy concerns against surveillance and back door threats of any kind.