Irreal

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

Forbes has a bit more information on the closing of Lavabit. They provide additional clues that Ladar Levison of Lavabit was indeed asked to monitor users’ logins in order to capture their keys.

Among other things, we learn that Levison has complied with “two dozen” individual warrants in the 10 years that he has run Lavabit. He says explicitly that the reason he shut down Lavabit was not because of a request for a single user’s data but to protect all his users. That’s a bit ambiguous, I suppose, but a fair interpretation is that the government wanted him to do something that could potentially affect more than a single targeted user.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Levison explaining why he is stepping away from email:

If you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either.

Those of you who who follow Irreal daily know that I recently migrated the email that was going to my Gmail account to Lavabit. All of that mail was from technical mailing lists so it didn’t really matter much except as a statement of principle. Now Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, shows us what principle is really about.

Levison announced Thursday that for reasons he is legally barred from disclosing he is shutting down Lavabit. He says that it was a hard decision to walk away from 10 years work but that he could not be complicit in crimes against the American people. In as much as Lavabit has previously complied with specific warrants issued with reasonable probable cause, it seems a safe inference that he was being asked to provide a more wide-ranging access to users’ accounts.

Because of the way Lavabit works, this would mean either monitoring users’ logins to capture their passwords or making copies of emails before they were encrypted. Either of these would break faith with Lavabit’s users so Levison apparently felt he had no choice but to close his business. A business, let me say again, that he spent 10 years building.

Friday brought the news that Silent Circle was closing its email service as well. Silent Circle says that they weren’t approached by the government but that in light of Lavabit’s experience they felt it was likely and rather than put their users at risk they preemptively closed the service and destroyed the server it ran on.

Years of hard work and doubtlessly many jobs were lost with the two closings. All this so that no Americans could keep their emails private. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and the others who have willingly collaborated with this illegal government spying may not care but they should. The Technology and Innovation Foundation reported this week that US cloud computing companies could lose between $21 billion and $35 billion because of their ties to the NSA. As Edward Snowden remarked about the Lavabit closing,

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.

Perhaps it’s time for one of the big boys to take a lesson on integrity from Lavabit. Imagine what would happen, for example, if Google threatened to shut down Gmail.

Update: Those who you → Those of you who

Personally, I think the only thing to do is to go back to the original
sense of the Fourth Amendment and say, no warrantless wiretapping, no
general warrants, no surveillance without specific probable cause, no
exceptions, ever. There shouldn’t even be something like FISA to allow
exceptions for special cases.

Commenter Petréa Mitchell in response to the excellent post by Bruce Schneier on how to restore trust in government after the NSA revelations.