Lavabit's owner threatened with arrested for shutting down rather than spying on customers

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alright, show of hands, who didnt see this coming…
…
…
…anyone?

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I think we are going to need a bigger Airport Hotel.

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Civil liberties in the US seem to be circling the bowl faster and faster. May be time to cut my ties to the land of my birth once and for all.

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and go to…?
it’s not just america, its global. or perhaps its just that america is global, but i think a lot of these politicians WANT to do these same things, america just put in the framework to LET them. either way you arent much better off anywhere else.

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Thirteenth Amendment anyone?

Because when that one goes, we are all seriously fucked.

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This is utterly chilling. What on earth is going on with our country? Secret courts, secret gag orders, secret spying on american citizens - and whistleblowers getting labeled as spies and enemies, while they flee to Russia?!.

This is like something out of a Cory Doctorow novel. I feel like any second now another story will hit the news about a team of 13 year olds that used their xboxes to build a distributed, open version of Lavabit and SecretCircle’s private messaging services. Then the 13 year olds are labeled as terrorits and hauled off to secret prison, where they secretly whither away out of sight from the herd.

Quite honestly it’s shocking but not that surprising. Nevertheless it does sadden me.

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“Threatened with arrested”?

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If a secret court can issue a secret order requiring you to spy on your customers, and if shutting down the service will land you in jail, then simply not operating the kind of service that spooks find snoopworthy is the only option.

But isn’t that precisely what the Feds want? If no more companies give you secure secret services, then they’ve won, right? Scaring the owners into shutting down (and making others to scared to start) is exactly what they want.

I’m not saying that the owners shouldn’t do this, when their livelihoods may be on the line. But the blurb seems to make it sound like shutting all the services down is the principled way forward.

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That’s where my thoughts went also.

If this report pans out as fully factual, how was Ladar Levinson not being forced into involuntary servitude to the (presumably) NSA?

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Not go to, stay where I am. I realize it’s all headed down the same path, but the US is making it more and more unpleasant to be an American abroad anyway. Just look up FATCA and the associated BS they’re imposing on those unpatriotic enough to live in another country.

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Shit. You know things are bad when people are fleeing to Russia.

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You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having
both at once.
– Lazarus Long

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Call you rep and senator! Call you rep and senator! Call you rep and senator! Call you rep and senator!

We have to mobilize and act if where are going to stop what is gong on and put structures in place to make sure it never happens again. It is no so much that they are fired, loose their privileges, and go to jail. There need to be a system to prevent other parts of the government from running out of control. NSA, FBI, DoJ, they seem like one unit now.

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Scoff. The 13th Amendment won’t go away. The second part of it is too profitable: “… except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted…”

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exactly. write the titles in proper grammar if you want peeps to read the articles

Time for a distributed, open source version of everything secure.

Time for someone to start selling a laptop that is secure ‘out of the box’ - not requiring anyone to learn and install encryption or anything else, with TOR pre-installed (instead of explorer or safari).

And, I guess, finally, time for me to learn how to use/install linux once and for all.

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Anything not forbidden is mandatory after all.

I was building my own twist on a secure messaging system and stopped based on the same concern. I live in the US and I just couldn’t come up with an approach that would be secure even if I or my company were legally subverted.

I’ll do something cute and fluffy instead.

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Use proper capitalization and punctuation if you want people to read your comments.

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The USA is fast becoming the Unrelenting State Surveillance Regime.

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