every time another place like this shuts down is another wound on our society, and on the very concept of essential liberty itself. This is the berth of the new feudalism and i am sad that i should live to see these times. 
I hope we choose to replace email with something secure. We have the technology…
Can a nation survive without the trust of its citizens?
I wish she didn’t surrender like this. “I’m not a political person,” she says, but what we need are the people who “aren’t political people” to GET political, to MAKE this an issue. The US is still a democracy, for the most part. It responds to enough people making a loud enough riot (the Tea Party is ample evidence of that and, to a lesser degree, so is Occupy). Smart and principled people need to stand wherever they can, and know that they don’t stand alone when they do. It’s pointless to just have empty hope for some different future. Do something about it, today.
This seems more like she’s tired of Groklaw and was looking for an excuse to shut down. After SCO, the whole site seemed disjointed and disconnected and wandered about. The origin of the site was to help us understand SCO… she probably should have shut it down then like she wanted to.
annnnnnnnnd Kolab (mykolab.com) is currently inaccessible.
She doesn’t have to shut down, just encrypt the hell out of her email twice BEFORE it gets to/from the internet.
Sneaker net a separate email machine that is not connected to the internet in any way and stop worrying about it.
It can even be done via a separate “out of the country” service provider. (I smell a business opportunity here for some enterprising Asians or a new business model for SeaLand to be revived… 
What we have here is a failure to properly use GPG. Embrace GPG and choose a non-POS client and this issue goes away as relevant bits are stored encrypted on disk.
Also with that said, this sort of cowardice is what enables actions like this. Instead of proudly standing up and saying fuck you one pisses ones self and surrenders. It is disgusting. There are still very hard rules in place they can’t effectively circumvent, but we have people screaming like they have have suddenly been dropped into the old GDR. We are far from there currently, but it is stuff like that will definitely help forward it in that direction.
Most definitely. Look at some of the old com block countries. Some had a nice run with out the trust of their citizens.
Before you say there were revolutions, I will say this… The nature of a government is ultimately transitory.
Where do we go to get protection from our own goverments? There are hundreds of millions of us who would work oh-so-very-hard to not have to deal with this madness.
And we’re the ones who invent everything and do all the work!
The three boxes… soap box, ballot box, and for a great enough failure the ammo box.
See, that sounds like THEIR sort of solution, not ours.
We’re the clever ones, we shouldn’t let them set context like that.
THEIR who?
Properly exercise all three does require being clever. More clever than most people actually are unfortunately or they would of used their votes more wisely.
This is sad news – Lavabit was set up in part to challenge the US Govt. over it’s snooping activities and to dare them to act, so it’s predictable that it might close rather than submit to a national security letter. GrokLaw isn’t obviously trying to do anything subversive or challenging to the authorities. I’ve enjoyed reading articles posted on it from time to time. Friends who are lawyers link to it, etc. It’s closure is a casualty of over-zealous surveillance.
Email is by definition insecure. The data sets the NSA is really after, the metadata of who is talking to who and when, NEEDS to be plaintext for any email server to accept your content. GPG helps, but it doesn’t address the whole of the problem.
GPG can protect the contents of communication and people practicing journalism should learn to use it but it doesn’t protect the fact of communication. Who’s talking to whom is some of the most critical information, especially when they’re journalists and sources. There are steps you can take to conceal your identity as a source but when the adversary you’re concerned about is a nation’s intelligence apparatus, it’s very hard to really stay hidden.
Society can not function in a surveillance state. Groklaw shutting down is the an example of the chilling effect. How do lawyers defend their clients when the state has all their communication on file? How do candidates run for office when the state has all their communication? How do businesses innovate and create new products when the state has all their communication? How do educators teach new ideas when the state has all their communication? There is no protected speech in a surveillance state because there is no protection.
See, those just seem like terribly limiting options to me, and they play to the strengths of the reactionary and the weaknesses of the civil and pragmatic.
Like I said, we can be more clever than that. Why let the context be so limiting?
Given the bulk of the data when email, that is of very questionable usefulness.
Regardless of that if one is known and of interested to the government, they will be watching. This moves it into the realm of protecting what is moved around, not concealing it’s movement as that is already lost.
