If the adversary you’re concerned about is the NSA, email hosting outside the U.S. won’t help much. Most email traffic between servers is not encrypted and the NSA will read it as it goes in and out of the U.S. Using an email service in, say, Iceland would only help with mail sent and received with others who were also using mail services outside the U.S. (and outside its buddies like Great Britain, Australia, & others).
Email is a postcard, it has never been a secure form of communication.
The thing is this: if he made a statement to media, all of those media would then be told by the US government to not print, have an NSL. He’d need to talk to Greenwald securely, and right now, I think getting a secure channel to Greenwald, or any other independent journos, especially when you’re under FBI surveillance (if he got an NSL) is going to be difficult.
Or maybe, just maybe, with all of the facts at his disposal, he decided that the best way to fight this, the way most likely to serve actual Justice, was to do exactly what he did.
Or maybe he has family considerations that make international flight and the seeking of asylum not a choice that would affect him alone.
Or maybe you could tone it down a notch, 'cause you’re sounding pretty shrill just now.
Comon, I’m not demanding anything, or saying anything that out of line. I’m just pointing out what I feel is valid criticism. I’m just thinking if I was in the same position (which I’m obviously not) that would be my move. I think the government keeps getting away with this shit because nobody is willing to challenge them publicly.
Please explain the change your referring to?
Looks more like business as usual.
Really, you would be willing to spend several years in prison, forfeit your business, and probably have your family go bankrupt?
Do you get dizzy walking things back that fast?
The email was pretty clear to me, and he didn’t have to put himself in harms way to do it. This way he has to freedom to move overseas and start the service somewhere else, if such a place can be found.
I’ll host your email at XMission, and although I’ll respond to warrants, I won’t roll over for everything else the other American ISPs will. Less than 5% of our law enforcement requests are real in-jurisdiction warrants. The other 95% get sent because usually an ISP will respond to a scary letter over protecting their customer’s constitutional rights.
If Lavabit received a warrant, shutting down won’t keep them from contempt of court. I’d really like to hear more details as to what happened. If I was Snowden’s position, I’d be using something like mixmaster to send/receive email to a server or VPS that I controlled. Maybe they didn’t teach them how to do that at Booz Allen.
Yes I would. Just like I would never snitch on anyone. Its called a principled stand and some people actually take them every once and awhile.
And do you have any examples of taking a principled stand of such a magnitude? This sounds like grandstanding to me. I understand that you THINK that your spirit is indomitable and incorruptible and that you will always do the right thing and not be cowed by fear. But do you have any evidence of this?
And even more, even if you have evidence of your super-humanness, do you think that the rest of the mortals should live up to your impossible standard?
Here’s a second question: why would you never snitch on someone? What if that person was a murderer or a rapist? It seems to me that your impossible standard of personal sacrifice for the greater good seems to be in opposition to your stance on snitching. I think what is really going on is that you hate the police/government and wouldn’t want to cooperate, not that you have some moral high ground.
This wouldn’t help the typical person anyway. Most people couldn’t set up an email server. On top of that, the vast majority would find port 25 blocked by their isp as you imply. This would add the need for a forwarding service or convincing everyone you know to use a non standard port. Oh, don’t forget the terms they agreed to stating they wouldn’t run any services.
So why not public key encryption? Nothing leaves your desktop without being hard core encrypted. Encrypt your hard drive too. Who knows, they may even still be able to read it if they really want to make the effort, but I doubt they will spend the resources on you or me. Of course, again you have to get everyone you communicate with to play along.
More so, even if you found a secure service to use, you still can’t guarantee the other end of your communications. Who knows the agenda of the service that people you email with use? If it was for a small specific group of people you could host an email server behind a vpn. Might want to give up on the secure email thing. Maybe look into encrypted chats, or maybe just watching what you say…
I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.
Don’t forget the Supreme Court and the Presidency, too.
In this case, one of the big issues is that Lavabit is a corporation, and corporations don’t have 4th Amendment rights to “business records.” (Something that goes back 100 years, designed to allow easier regulation.) And due to a crazy 40 year old Supreme Court precedent called the “third-party doctrine,” if you give any information to any third party corporation, you’re deemed to not have any privacy rights to it anymore. Even though in reality there’s a big difference between being willing to share A with X, B with Y, and C with Z, and having one person know all of those things.
So Lavabit doesn’t have any 4th Amendment rights to that data (being a corporation, and it being “business records,”), but Snowden doesn’t have any 4th Amendment rights either (since he gave it to the corporation, the government says he obviously has no privacy interest against the government seeing it too.)
Maybe ssh to a home DSL in Iceland. Use a messaging app which stores data in RAM. Swap turned off.
Mailpile promises to address some of these issues, its a open source mail client that is being developed by a team based in Iceland. It will have encryption built in.
I find it interesting how many people are concerned about the security of their email provider when said messages are sent across the InterWeb in clear text. Secure/private email communications are a bit of a moot point when we know that the NSA is listening on the wire.
The only secure(ish) method of using email is to encrypt the contents of the message prior to it being sent to the InterWebs, ie: paste the encrypted text into gmail. In that case - as long as the encryption holds - one email provider is just as good as another.
Agreed. I think this sort of thing should just get put into the standards. Imagine the NSA trying this shit when EVERYTHING is encrypted as a matter of course. Even if it’s all relatively low level encryption, decrypting the massive quantities of data could spell doom for these programs.
Now that you mention it, postcards seem pretty secure relative to an indexed searchable database of communications.
At least postcards require manpower.
