Mega Mail

There is so much to love in this announcement. Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz is going to offer secure, encrypted email and house the server out of the reach of the illegal snooping of the NSA. Not content to make the US DOJ look like the Keystone Kops after their trying unsuccessfully, and probably illegally, to extradite him and destroy his business, Dotcom is once against sticking his finger in the US government’s eye by working to replace the Lavabit and Silent Circle secure email services with one of his own.

Really, I don’t know what the government was thinking. By again overstepping, and in a climate which already sees a majority of Americans worried about their activities, the FBI/NSA provoked the two services to shutdown. This guaranteed two things:

  1. Someone would open a new service outside of US jurisdiction.
  2. Many Americans (and others) who haven’t previously used a secure email service will sign up.

Add to that the likelyhood that an already skittish Congress will be more inclined to bow to popular pressure and significantly rein them in and it’s pretty easy to conclude that they haven’t done themselves any favors.

Like everyone else, I don’t want some wackjob blowing me up but the Fourth Amendment is the law of the land and there’s no wackjob exception in it. I get tired of hearing about “balancing security and privacy.” The Fourth Amendment says what it says: you want to go snooping, show probable cause and get an individualized search warrant. No short cuts allowed no matter how much easier it makes the intelligence agencies’ jobs.

Update: Secure Circle → Silent Circle

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