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Edward Snowden’s Email Provider Shuts Down Amid Secret Court Battle
- oo7jeep 13y agoTL,DR: "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."
- conductor 13y agoIf this is happening in the USA with its famous constitution, then well, I think the end of this statement can be easily converted just to _any_country_.
- rustynails 13y agoMany other countries follow suit. Almost certainly, Australia and the UK will see this as a precedent.
- emiliobumachar 13y agoThe same can be happening in any country, but we know for a fact it is happening in the USA. Uncertainty is better than a certain, unfavourable outcome. I'm keeping my US cloud services, but I have no illusions: they're being logged by the NSA.
- dictum 13y agoA country cannot be on the United States' good side without bending to its will. Also, the governments of other countries would love to have a peek on whatever intel the NSA has regarding their enemies. So, if the US wants your data, they have great diplomatic resources to compel a country to hand it (read: CIA). I'm speculating as I don't know if there is a precedent of the US requesting data from another country using secret warrants, but as long as they have a warrant and the country does not have an overtly adversarial relationship with the US, it's a target. Based on their tradition of bank secrecy, Switzerland may be an exception, but I wouldn't bet on it.
- pyre 13y agoThe US doesn't need a 'secret warrant' to ask for information from another country. They don't really need a warrant at all. They just ask for it. IIRC, even the NSA isn't legally bound to avoid spying on American citizens when they are out of the country.
- mpyne 13y agoTo avoid it, no. But if they do uncover evidence on American citizens it could not be used in a trial and must be filtered out (although, see 'parallel construction').
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoWhat makes the American Constitution exceptional is not its content but the fact that it was written in the late 18th century. In the intervening two centuries, several other industrialized liberal democracies have adopted constitutions that are broader and more inclusive than the Bill of Rights.
- solistice 13y agoBut clutter isn't what makes a legal document effective. I'd rather have a concise definition of what is a right and what not than pages upon pages of dancing around that issue.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoThe Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a little over 2,200 words and is clear and concise. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html The Bill of Rights, on the other hand, is so terse that debate rages continually about what a given statement actually means (see, e.g. the 2nd Amendment).
- solistice 13y agoSo there aren't any people trying to latch onto every nook in order to subvert the original message? That's...intresting. I'm mostly familar with the American Bill of Rights and the German Grundgesetz, which is much longer and contains more rights, albeit not always more solid definitions. I've been in discussions before, where I'd defend one right, and was contered with another, equally valid right that was somehow conflicting with the other. In that way, the Grundgesetz trips over itself, and it's hard to argue for a given interpretation (so are these rights equal, or is this right of a lower denomination than the other, and how far can you compromise this right so this right can be put into effect, and if everyone has a Recht auf Arbeit (Right to have work), aren't we infringing on that?). Obviously, I'd rather have a terse, but in itself noncontradicting bill of rights than a long list of irreconcilable demands. But they're both not neccesairily optimal.
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- Buzaga 13y agoThat is absurd. Do you think every country, and every country folk, would let the government pass a bulldozer all over their rights like this? This is just projecting. In other words, that shit wouldn't fly everywhere, for sure. This all emanates from the 9/11 and Patriot Act and Secret Laws with no oversight, that's your problem specifically, of course every government must be wanting it's own surveillance supermachine too, but it doesn't mean every single one of them is willing(or have means) to pass every possible barrier to do it. Other countries have their own constituitions too and people guarding it, and different political systems, and different relation of the people with their government. Brasilians, for example, are not patriotic(as you are), we like the localization and our folk but absolutely everyone despises the government, the governants are completely cowering with the demonstration, pulling their repression apparatus out and on... It's absurd and it's also a derrotist statement, this lavabit guy is a hero and the more people go against this rotten government, more clear it becomes the damage is shared by everyone AND the country itself.
- dictum 13y ago>Do you think every country, and every country folk, would let the government pass a bulldozer all over their rights like this? If your government is not willing to pass a bulldozer over its rights, the US are more than willing to bulldoze your government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#American_involvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27%C3%A9...
- emiliobumachar 13y agoI wholehearteadly agree with your larger point, but as a Brazilian I think Brazil is not a good example in this regard. People here despise the government because of corruption of the "stealing" kind, and inefficiency. Despite our recent experiment with dictatorship ended in the 80's, We have a long road to travel in terms of awareness about the dangers of tirany. The government takes the fingerprints of every citizen when we go make our I.D. Cards, for example. No one makes a fuss. Official propaganda is standard practise (how else would one call the government-bought advertisements to raise awareness about its deeds?) Recenty the folks who organize electios are all over the TV with their campaign to take everyone's prints (see "inneficiency") in order to "make our elections even more secure". Though the last president's plans for "social control of the media" were soundly rebutted, it's telling that he even thought he could try. I'm an optimist regarding the next decades, but it's a long road indeed.
- 001sky 13y agoSwiss banking (famously) had this niche biz model, but its future seems unteneable in the digital era. Silicon Valley has been complicit behind the scenes. Both overtly with technical hw/sw, and also more subtly (ie, "personalization" from which you can't opt out).
- lawn 13y agoExtensive discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6181081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6181081 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6180846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6180846.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mpyne 13y ago"Court records show that, in June, Lavabit complied with a routine search warrant targeting a child pornography suspect in a federal case in Maryland. That suggests that Levison isn’t a privacy absolutist. Whatever compelled him to shut down now must have been exceptional." Wow. Now I'm even more interested at what the NSL/court order was looking for here.
- cheald 13y agoI will put dollars to donuts they were after Snowden's contact list. They want to know about his deadman's switch, who holds the keys, and who they have to squeeze to defuse that particular landline.
- shasta 13y agoThey're not asking for any particular information that lavabit has now. If they were, shutting down wouldn't be a solution to not handing it over. They are asking for additional access going forward.
- cdjk 13y agoBut that additional access would probably include various keys that would let them decrypt previous communication. Maybe the order was to log passwords on login, or something like that, that would allow recovery of the key and decryption of stored data, which may not be possible depending on the original architecture of the system.
- cheald 13y agoI know, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that Snowden may be in contact with people that his pursuers are not yet aware of. Tapping his communications would give them a much larger attack surface.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago>They want to know about his deadman's switch They may soon find out more than they wanted to know about it, if it was automated in any way.
- mtgx 13y ago"after secret court battle"? I got the impression the court battle hasn't started yet over this. Or is he talking about that child porn subpoena? But the headline is confusing.
- grey-area 13y agoHis letter states that he has already made representations twice to the authorities (the FISA court?), but is obliged to keep those secret: As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests. https://lavabit.com/ https://lavabit.com/
- dragonwriter 13y ago> His letter states that he has already made representations twice to the authorities (the FISA court?) A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order wouldn't be appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, it would be appealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review and from there to the US Supreme Court; from the context, then, its likely either a District Court under the Fourth Circuit or the Fourth Circuit itself (possibly both, given the "twice made the appropriate requests") to which application has been made. Which would make sense if Snowden was targetted, since he is a US person, and an order for surveillance targetting him would go through the regular District Courts, not the FISC/FISCR.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> I got the impression the court battle hasn't started yet over this. He wouldn't be continuing the fight in an appeals court if it hand't started in a lower court under that court of appeals.
- conductor 13y agoIf you are looking for an alternative to Lavabit, try RiseUp [1]. There is a nice read in their "About Us" page [2] [1] - https://riseup.net/en https://riseup.net/en [2] - https://help.riseup.net/en/about-us https://help.riseup.net/en/about-us Added: Though, it is based in Seattle, so what happened to Lavabit can happen to them too, unfortuneately.
- lvs 13y agoAll of these centralized services (such as the one you linked) are susceptible to the same strong-arm tactics if they're based in the US.
- betterunix 13y agoNothing special about the USA. Hushmail is a Canadian company and they were strong-armed by the DEA. Do not let some third party hold your keys, do not use some applet to decrypt your mail. This is public key encryption 101.
- grote 13y agoThere's also https://mykolab.com https://mykolab.com hosted in Switzerland. What's more: It is 100% Open Source, so you can host it yourself decentrally.
- mpyne 13y agoAnd you probably should, if you want to maximize your legal protections against governments where third-party access to your data gives the government easier access to your data.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSo for those of you wondering about Jury nullification, the way it would work in this case is that Levison would reveal that the NSA was hounding him with NSL letters, they would charge him with violating the terms of the NSL and the jury would acquit him anyway. I hope we can get a case like that to move that aspect of the conversation forward. It helped get bad laws off the books in the civil rights cases and it would help here.
- oleganza 13y agoWho would risk their own life to do that for "the good of many"? People like Snowden are exceptions, not a rule, because the guns are out there pointed to everyone. Why don't we instead of asking individual heroes to fight a killing machine called "the state", do that: 1. Acknowledge the evil of the state. 2. Find practical non-violent ways to boycott it. E.g. blacklist personally everyone involved in violent aggression. Switch off USD to Bitcoin. Expose violence of the state consistently in every relevant circumstance etc.
- jlgreco 13y agoI doubt, even in our current situation, that Jury members would become targets if they refused to convict.
- pyre 13y agoI think we're referring to the person willing to put their freedom at risk to wager that a jury nullification would happen as the 'hero.'
- jmomo 13y agoIt would never get that far. The "jury selection" process weeds out average people and leaves only the most boring, dumb, and/or untruthful jurors.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago> Who would risk their own life to do that for "the good of many"? People who feel strongly about what is right, versus what the law says, do.
- mjfl 13y agoSo what happens if this guy starts telling people what happened in that courtroom? He gets arrested? What happened to freedom of speech?
- siculars 13y agoDistributed cryptography/services in multiple jurisdictions is the only permanent solution or as a delaying tactic at a minimum. Where keys or parts of data or multiple onion style encryption rests in a chain of services distributed globally in multiple jurisdictions. Something like the Ceph file system but for everything.
- betterunix 13y agoSounds like anonymous remailers to me. Unfortunately it is impractical to run a remailer in many countries, the USA included, because of the approach law enforcement agencies take to remailers (basically, "attack the datacenter with a team of soldiers").
- mililani 13y agoSo, since HN is filled with smart engineers, how should one build a sustainable, fully encrypted email service untouchable by the Feds?
- slg 13y agoThe technology isn't the problem here. Politics is the problem.
- betterunix 13y agoIt already exists. Use PGP, send messages through anonymous remailers. If you cannot use anonymous remailers, post messages to Usenet in alt.anonymous.messages using Tor. If not Tor, then via a proxy server. If none of the above, just make sure you are not doing it from your house. If even that is impossible, know that traffic analysis will be possible. Why is this something that needs to be repeated to the technically skilled people on HN?
- sillysaurus 13y agoTor is funded directly by the US govt. Something like 60-80% of their annual million-dollar budget. Maybe being superstitious isn't helpful, but in this instance, I'm not so sure Tor is able to be relied on. A proxy server won't work for the same reason a personal server wouldn't work. It's tied to you eventually, either through a paper trail or a packet trail. Oh, and drop the condescending attitude, okay?
- betterunix 13y ago"Maybe being superstitious isn't helpful, but in this instance, I'm not so sure Tor is able to be relied on." Tor has been analyzed extensively by cryptographers and security researchers; there is literally a mountain of published research about it. It is operated by an independent organization. I would be more cautious about the Linux kernel, a vastly larger codebase that could and probably does have numerous back doors, than about Tor. "A proxy server won't work for the same reason a personal server wouldn't work. It's tied to you eventually, either through a paper trail or a packet trail." Which is why it is below anonymous remailers and Tor on my list. Proxy servers are better than nothing at all.
- logn 13y agoDo not use webapps.