Groklaw Shuts Down, Cites Government Surveillance

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kbot
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Groklaw Shuts Down, Cites Government Surveillance

Post by kbot » 08-20-2013 07:23 PM

If this is the same story that I heard about earlier today, the head of this company is being hounded by he government for refusing to cooperate with the government and folding the company. Kinda chilling..... Once again, the government is showing us that in their eyes we're all terrorists......

Groklaw, a respected legal analysis website, ceased publication on Tuesday out of concern over unavoidable government surveillance on the Internet.

The website shutdown comes just weeks after two providers of secure email, Lavabit and Silent Circle, opted to discontinue their services. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison did so to avoid becoming "complicit in crimes against the American people," presumably a reference to a U.S. government demand for customer data and an accompanying gag order. Silent Circle, aware of Lavabit's shutdown, preemptively shut down its Silent Mail service, under the belief that the company could not provide the promised security in the current legal climate.

The problem is that email is fundamentally insecure and cannot be kept private in the face of sweeping government surveillance and legal process, despite supposed constitutional protections.

[ Will Google Glass help government spy on citizens? Read Google Glass To Arm Police, Firefighters. ]

Citing LavaBit founder Ladar Levison's observation that if we knew what he knew about email, we wouldn't use it either, Groklaw founder and editor Pamela Jones said she cannot continue to operate her community-based website, which often relies on confidential tips, without some degree of email privacy.

"There is now no shield from forced exposure," said Jones, who contends constant surveillance makes it impossible to be fully human.

As if to demonstrate the irresistibility of government demands, Jones's decision came shortly after the editor of The Guardian revealed that in the past month British security officials demanded and carried out the destruction of hard drives containing data provided to the paper by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It also followed reports that David Miranda, partner of reporter Glenn Greenwald, who helped publish information revealed by Snowden, was detained for nine hours under U.K. terrorism laws and had his electronic devices seized.

In a tweet, Privacy International remarked that the closure of Groklaw "demonstrates how central the right to privacy is to free expression" and that the mere threat of surveillance is enough to inhibit discourse through self-censorship.

Surveillance has an additional cost: It drives businesses away from the United States. The Information Technology and Innovation Institute, a technology think tank, estimates that U.S. cloud service providers, unable to assure privacy, could lose between $22 billion and $35 billion to competitors in Europe over the next three years.

To understand how that might happen, look no further than Jones' recommendation for those who cannot give up online life entirely. "If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the U.S., laws which attempt to afford more privacy to citizens," she wrote.

Given the extent to which U.S. authorities have been able to force cooperation from Swiss banking officials, it would probably be unwise to assume there's much security for data anywhere.

http://www.informationweek.com/security ... /240160205

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Post by kbot » 08-20-2013 07:29 PM

Interesting related article.....

Guest: NSA surveillance program is where big data and privacy clash

Originally published Saturday, August 17, 2013 at 4:07 PM

Big data and civil liberties are at odds in the debate over the NSA surveillance program, writes guest columnist Alex Alben.

By Alex Alben

Special to The Times

THE controversy raised by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the vast NSA program to track email contacts and phone conversations has revitalized an important debate about the proper balance between protecting American lives and protecting our civil liberties.

Congress and the Obama administration now seem poised to act on the issue, but the path forward will be as murky as the spy methods employed to capture data.

The NSA surveillance debate echoes an earlier brouhaha over Internet privacy. In January of 1999, Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Scott McNealy observed that on the Internet, “You have zero privacy anyway. ... Get over it.” McNealy was referring to criticism of the user-ID features of Intel’s Pentium III chip.

Despite McNealy’s warning, as the Internet evolved over the next 15 years, eager adapters continued to hand over data to websites, Internet service providers and other application providers.

The industry attempted to self-regulate with some degree of success, but the privacy policies of Web companies allow a broad swath of uses of personal information voluntarily provided by users. It’s no secret that 99 percent of Internet users simply click through the consent to privacy terms in order to enjoy the benefits of various products.

Unwittingly, as we feverishly adopted new technologies and devices, we created digital footprints without fully appreciating how such data might be stored and used.

Internet companies have always been quick to point out that users, who supply personal data on sites such as Yahoo and Facebook, can disable cookies in their Web browsers.

Yet the true extent of data mining and tracking of Web-browsing habits is little appreciated by most Internet users, even when it is disclosed in the fine print of 30-page privacy policies. Abandoning snail mail and landline telephony created the conditions for a surveillance society where our daily communication could be recorded and read by entities given sufficient access.

“Big data,” a term that refers to using high-powered computing to analyze vast amounts of digital data, uses algorithms to decipher globs of seemingly random data points. Scientists will use many of these techniques to tackle climate change, global epidemics and other critical problems. Business will utilize big data to more deeply understand trends and consumer habits.

Smart political organizations, like the 2012 Obama presidential campaign, will utilize such data to target voters with messages and get-out-the-vote operations. Like all new technologies, specific inventions will benefit society and also pose new and unpredictable threats.

But now, big data has been harnessed in the service of finding patterns that can reveal potential threats to our security without a public debate over costs and benefits. To pose a crude calculation, how many lives saved per year justifies the vast surveillance of our email metadata and phone conversations — 5, 50, 500?

While the government assures us that these methods are necessary to capture would-be evildoers, the secret nature of these investigations prevents us from learning if the surveillance was necessary to achieve the national-security outcome.

In a sense, part of the problem is inherent in the technology. Unlike phone wiretaps that require examination of specific connections between Suspect X and his or her associates, big data requires a vast funnel of data from a universe of users in order to identify meaningful patterns that might give rise to suspicious behavior.

The Obama administration has one hand tied behind its back in defending the NSA program, which began in the first term of President George W. Bush. The more specific details it divulges on thwarted terrorist attacks, the more the program and ongoing investigations are compromised.

If the public had more trust in the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to act as an impartial arbiter of surveillance requests, the program would enjoy more support.

As it is, The Associated Press reports that the court, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), considered 1,789 government surveillance requests last year and failed to approve only one.

Consensus is building around serious proposals to revise the FISA court, either by expanding the number of judges or mandating a representative for the public interest in such secret proceedings. In the current system, only a government representative is present to make the case before the judge.

The proposed public advocate would report findings on a regular basis to Congress and even to civil-liberties groups. Of course, critics will contend that such a public advocate will become a captive of the FISA process and fail to exercise true independence.

Ultimately, this debate between transparency and national security comes down to trust. Those who believe our elected officials and public servants in agencies such as the NSA and CIA are seeking to protect the public will come down on the side of allowing surveillance programs that rely on big data.

Those who distrust government and see the potential for abuse in all cases of general data collection will want to scrap the entire system and accept the risk that some threats, which could be exposed by data tracking, will fall through the cracks.

A dozen years after 9/11, the tide is turning back toward more resolute protection of our private communications and more transparency around judicial decisions that authorize the government to read our messages.

At minimum, the FISA process needs to be opened up to meaningful oversight by a variety of observers who can advocate for the public interest in protecting privacy. We can’t live in a permanent state of Orwellian diminution of personal freedom, even if that makes us safer.

http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/20 ... 18xml.html

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Post by BenSlain » 08-21-2013 01:31 AM

So if you have to fold your company because of an outside influence wouldn't that make the outside influence the terrorist?
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been The champion of the world.

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