Email
service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using
US-based companies
Edward
Snowden: 'Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of
our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren't fighting for
our interests the same way'
Glenn
Greenwald
9
August, 2013
A
Texas-based encrypted email service recently
revealed
to be used by Edward
Snowden
- Lavabit - announced
yesterday it was shutting itself down
in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret
US court orders to provide government access to its users' content.
"After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend
operations," the company's founder, Ladar Levinson, wrote in
a statement
to users posted on the front page of its website. He said the US
directive forced on his company "a difficult decision: to become
complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from
nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." He
chose the latter.
CNET's
Declan McCullagh smartly
speculates
that Lavabit was served "with [a] federal court order to
intercept users' (Snowden?) passwords" to allow ongoing
monitoring of emails; specifically: "the order can also be to
install FedGov-created malware." After challenging the order in
district court and losing - all in a secret court proceeding,
naturally - Lavabit shut itself down to avoid compliance while it
appeals to the Fourth Circuit.
This
morning, Silent Circle, a US-based secure online communication
service, followed
suit by shutting its own encrypted email service.
Although it said it had not yet been served with any court order, the
company, in a statement by its founder, internet security guru Phil
Zimmerman, said: "We see the writing on the wall, and we have
decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now."
What
is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the
company is gagged
by law
even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the
court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner
of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his
customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not
allowed to talk about it. Just as is true for people
who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act,
Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions
if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company. Thus we
get hostage-message-sounding missives like this:
I
wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my
decision. I cannot. 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. As things currently stand, I cannot share my
experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made
the appropriate requests."
Does
that sound like a message coming from a citizen of a healthy and free
country? Secret courts issuing secret rulings invariably in favor of
the US government that those most affected are barred by law from
discussing? Is there anyone incapable at this point of seeing what
the United States has become? Here's the very sound advice issued by
Lavabit's founder:
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."
As
security expert Bruce Schneier wrote
in a great Bloomberg column last week,
this is one of the key aspects of the NSA
disclosures: the vast public-private surveillance partnership. That's
what makes Lavabit's stance so heroic: as our reporting has
demonstrated, most US-based tech and telecom companies (though
not
all)
meekly submit to the US government's dictates and cooperate
extensively and enthusiastically with the NSA to ensure access to
your communications.
Snowden,
who told me today that he found Lavabit's stand "inspiring",
added:
"Ladar
Levison and his team suspended the operations of their 10 year old
business rather than violate the Constitutional rights of their
roughly 400,000 users. The President, Congress, and the Courts have
forgotten that the costs of bad policy are always borne by ordinary
citizens, and it is our job to remind them that there are limits to
what we will pay.
"America
cannot succeed as a country where individuals like Mr. Levison have
to relocate their businesses abroad to be successful. Employees and
leaders at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of
our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren't fighting for
our interests the same way small businesses are. The defense they
have offered to this point is that they were compelled by laws they
do not agree with, but one day of downtime for the coalition of their
services could achieve what a hundred Lavabits could not.
"When
Congress returns to session in September, let us take note of whether
the internet industry's statements and lobbyists - which were
invisible in the lead-up to the Conyers-Amash vote - emerge on the
side of the Free Internet or the NSA and its Intelligence Committees
in Congress."
The
growing (and accurate) perception that most US-based companies are
not to be trusted with the privacy of electronic communications poses
a real threat to those companies' financial interests. A report
issued this week
by the Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that the US
cloud computing industry, by itself, could
lose
between $21 billion to $35 billion due to reporting about the
industry's ties to the NSA. It also notes that other nations'
officials have been issuing the same kind of warnings to their
citizens about US-based companies as the one issued by Lavabit
yesterday:
And
after the recent PRISM leaks, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter
Friedrich declared publicly, 'whoever fears their communication is
being intercepted in any way should use services that don't go
through American servers.' Similarly, Jörg-Uwe Hahn, a German
Justice Minister, called for a boycott of US companies."
The
US-based internet industry knows that the recent transparency brought
to the NSA is a threat to their business interests. This week,
several leading Silicon Valley and telecom executives met
with President Obama
to discuss their "surveillance partnership". But the
meeting was - naturally - held in total secrecy. Why shouldn't the
agreements and collaborations between these companies and the NSA for
access to customer communications not be open and public?
Obviously,
the Obama administration, telecom giants, and the internet industry
are not going to be moved by appeals to transparency, privacy and
basic accountability. But perhaps they'll consider the damage being
done to the industry's global reputation and business interests by
constructing a ubiquitous spying system with the NSA and doing it all
in secret.
It's well past time to think about what all this
reflects about the US. As the New York Times Editorial Page put
it today,
referencing a front-page report from Charlie Savage enabled by NSA
documents we published: "Apparently no espionage tool that
Congress gives the National Security Agency is big enough or
intrusive enough to satisfy the agency's inexhaustible appetite for
delving into the communications of Americans." The NYT added:
Time
and again, the NSA has pushed past the limits that lawmakers thought
they had imposed to prevent it from invading basic privacy, as
guaranteed by the Constitution."
I
know it's much more fun and self-satisfying to talk about Vladimir
Putin and depict
him as this omnipotent cartoon villain.
Talking about the flaws of others is always an effective tactic for
avoiding our own, and as a bonus in this case, we get to and re-live
Cold War glory by doing it.
The best part of all is that we get to punish another country for the
Supreme Sin: defying the dictates of the US leader.
[Note
how a country's human rights problems becomes of interest to the US
political and media class only when that country defies the US:
hence, all the now-forgotten focus on Ecuador's press freedom record
when it granted asylum to Julian Assange and considered doing so for
Edward Snowden, while the truly repressive and deeply US-supported
Saudi regime barely rates a mention. Americans love to feign sudden
concern over a country's human rights abuses as a tool for punishing
that country for disobedience to imperial dictates and for being
distracted from their own government's abuses: Russia grants asylum
to Snowden --> Russia is terrible to gays! But maybe it's more
constructive for US media figures and Americans generally to think
about what's happening to their own country and the abuses of the own
government, the one for which they bear responsibility and over which
they can exercise actual influence.]
Lavabit
has taken an impressive and bold stand against the US government,
sacrificing its self-interest for the privacy rights of its users.
Those inclined to do so can return that support by helping it with
lawyers' fees to fight the US government's orders, via this
paypal link
provided in the
company's statement.
One
of the most remarkable, and I think enduring, aspects of the NSA
stories is how much open defiance there has been of the US
government. Numerous countries around the world have waved away
threats, from Hong Kong and Russia to multiple Latin American
nations. Populations around the world are expressing serious
indignation at the NSA and at their own government to the extent they
have collaborated. And now Lavabit has shut itself down rather than
participate in what it calls "crimes against the American
people", and in doing so, has gone to the legal limits in order
to tell us all what has happened. There will undoubtedly be more acts
inspired by Snowden's initial choice to unravel his own life to make
the world aware of what the US government has been doing in the dark.
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