27 ms·

Forced Exposure

• Questioneer 13y ago
  Lets not try to code our way out of this. We succumb to terror pushing away meaningless bits of code on Github as a crypto projects in response. Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets. Giving you a salary for technician work keeping infrastructure ticking. Enough enabling the beastly mess that is privatized 'national' security. The payments to infrastructure providing companies for data access. The kidnapping/torture/drone fire of others when technological routes don't work. If you have a career with Dell, AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and many others, start making demands or make resumes. Stop being complicit.
  • derefr 13y ago
    That's nice to say. Get angry, be outraged. But what do we do, day-to-day, while things are still a mess? How do you organize a revolution under the noses of the people you're revolting against? The code still has a purpose, even if it's not the "right" solution, long-term.
    • arkitaip 13y ago
      It really comes down to lobbying lots and lots of politicians who can stop the NSA by significantly slashing its funding or by enforcing existing laws. The Occupy movement showed that revolutions don't work in a state where government and police will conspire against its citizens by infiltrating and undermining its civil rights movements.
      • einhverfr 13y ago
        The problem with Occupy was that there was no demanded reforms, only complaints and protests against things. Protests aren't ever enough though. It is telling how little credibility Occupy had with Washington when Obama, giving his jobs speech during the protests, called for the deregulation of Wall St.
        • pdkl95 13y ago
          While Occupy DID make some demands; they were just made by the individual groups. It would be more correct, though, to say that "demands" weren't really the point of Occupy. They changed the national dialogue, and made a LOT of traditional euphamisms and arguments obsolete and useless by putting the core issue of class warfare back up in front where it belongs. "Cutting out decades of distraction an propaganda" may not have been an explicit "goal", but it was certainly a victory for the movement.
    • einhverfr 13y ago
      Revolution is not what you think. It consists of the small actions of millions of people. The small actions are usually more revolutionary than the large. The NSA has just created a huge market for guaranteed secure communications infrastructures. The technology is there. It may need some extensions but it is there. Some ideas (again no time for a startup now and this is too important): 1. An email-like service based on TOR with content encrypted via public key encryption end to end. 2. The second is an encrypted voice network. This can't encrypt metadata a swell in a way that central offices can't see it, but the contents could be encrypted easily enough. The code is a means to an end. We can't code our way out of the problem. We can build businesses that get us out and code is supportive of that.
      • perlpimp 13y ago
        Encoding your own mail means that you are playing by rules of the game NSA has set up. The only way is to make your own game and make them play by YOUR rules. If you encode your communications there is a barrier that they will break down directly by making you disclose the keys while threatening with Tax audits, jail time etc. Or by breaking down encryption commications. They are the largest employer of IT/Security/Cryptographers on the face of the earth. So the only way to do this is to make them not play their game. Frankly whole cancerous security apparatus has been fueled by privatized sector just like the one with privatized jail system. Sad to say this but there only way I can see this being resolved is political/etc. Start websites cover the stories. Find methods of figuring out whether they are listening to you or not. For example set up fake drug deals so you can draw them on fact of monitoring your communications. Sue them every instance you find them breaking down your doors. Yeah I know it is not pleasant. Just like OP said there is no easy way out of this. Also make working for contractors of NSA and being employee of NSA being a very unpatriotic and scummy thing to do - akin to digging around underwear drawer of your next door granny neighbor. My 2c.
        • einhverfr 13y ago
          > Encoding your own mail means that you are playing by rules of the game NSA has set up. well, actually, I was talking about encoding other people's email, for a fee. The goal is to change the game and change the rules. The NSA has created this market. Let's use this to reshape the game. > If you encode your communications there is a barrier that they will break down directly by making you disclose the keys while threatening with Tax audits, jail time etc. This is true, so the game is not just to get your own keys taken care of but everyone else's and locate the business in a country that will be better interested and able to stand up to NSA interests here. > Or by breaking down encryption commications. They are the largest employer of IT/Security/Cryptographers on the face of the earth. Again true, which is why the game has to change. > So the only way to do this is to make them not play their game. So the new game is to make sure as much traffic as possible is encrypted. All of the above take time. They could bug the end points, they could break down the encryption with massively parallel supercomputers. They could threaten individual users of the service. So the game is to make sure that everyone encrypts everything every time (or at least that enough do to make individualized efforts prohibitive on a dragnet scale). We know they don't like that game. They've been trying to get control over all encryption since the days of Clinton but they haven't yet. > Frankly whole cancerous security apparatus has been fueled by privatized sector just like the one with privatized jail system. Very true. BTW, read "The Servile State" by Hilaire Belloc if you want a really depressing read.... > Sad to say this but there only way I can see this being resolved is political/etc. Start websites cover the stories. Find methods of figuring out whether they are listening to you or not. For example set up fake drug deals so you can draw them on fact of monitoring your communications. Sue them every instance you find them breaking down your doors. Yeah I know it is not pleasant. If someone wants to, great. I am not in the US at the moment so my options are more limited. > Also make working for contractors of NSA and being employee of NSA being a very unpatriotic and scummy thing to do - akin to digging around underwear drawer of your next door granny neighbor. How do we do that? How many of us know such contractors?
    • davidw 13y ago
      > But what do we do Stop bothering with the articles here, and "get out of the building": * Call or write a real letter to your representatives in congress (assuming you're American). Hopefully that is something everyone has already done. * Coordinate - isn't there some place where people are organizing/coordinating this stuff? * Write a letter to the editor in your local newspaper. * If you're in the bay area, how about helping to organize a primary challenger for Nancy Pelosi? She did not vote to defund the NSA. People in SF have the money, the means, and the incentive to get someone in office who cares more about this stuff. * Donate money to politicians/groups opposing this stuff. The EFF, for instance.
    • pdkl95 13y ago
      "I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad." I've taught more people about the Web Of Trust and how to use GPG in the last ~1.5 months than in the last ~1.5 decades. "...and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be." Something about this current drama has made the whole concept of encryption and the realities of surveillance suddenly resonate with a LOT more people. It's not a majority yet, of course, but a change in perception this dramatic is a amazing. "We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.'" I have people emailing me encrypted email now, who just last year ignored the idea with the usual dismissal of it being "unnecessary" or "too complicated"[1]. "Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you riot. I don't want to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell your to write." So now that people are finally noticing the reality they live in, and are finally getting mad, I see this as what educators call a "teachable moment" to try and suggest a few broader concepts tan the gpg lessons they are asking for. "I'm as MAD AS HELL, and I'm NOT going to take this anymore!" A few things I've been trying to teach recently, now that there are actually people listening: * General education on the concept of data mining, and the power of a handful of JOIN clauses. The idea of grabbing all your phone calls is something most people already understand. Connecting a few random bits of entropy together to get a surprisingly reliable primary key is still not widely understood. * Web Of Trust - Starting small and local is good, just like in elections. It would be amazing if somehow the Key Signing Party could be worked into some traditional social ritual. * Stop supporting the feudal model of email, by tying your identity to an @company.com domain. Land is king IRL, and staking your claim on the internet is important for similar reasons. It would be nice if everybody could change their MX records and hosting service as easily as they change POTS long distance providers. * Stop using webmail - many of the benefits of encryption are lost if you don't keep the keys in your physical possession, as demonstrated by lavabit and elsewhere. This doesn't directly fix the problem[2], but it is stuff that can be done (and is being done) now, and these are certainly things that would help immediate problems faced when organizing a revolution. The NSA doesn't have the manpower or money to strong-arm their snooping routers into every last-mile endpoint. This kind of long-term cutting of the data the NSA can see is one of the better weapons we have against them. "Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell..."[3] [1] You would think a Biology professor would understand an argument about how this isn't necessary about them, but about maintaining the "herd immunity" of the email ecosystem... [2]: It might in the long run, once a lot more software support is written, and it finally becomes possible for regular people to extend their web of trust as far as, e.g. groklaw. [3]: Incidentally, the lecture at the end of Network comes to mind every time the government panics about Snowden: "...and YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU...WIIL...ATONE!" edit; formatting
  • madaxe 13y ago
    > If you have a career with Dell, AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and many others, start making demands or make resumes. Stop being complicit. Unfortunately, the majority of wage-slaves are so indentured to their overlords that simply leaving is not an option, as the alternative is penury and starvation - particularly when you work for a giant like BAH, who'll ensure nobody will ever employ you again. If you want to make a stand, don't hand in your notice, don't make a resume, don't make demands, just don't show up, and let 'em flail. Worst they'll do is fire you, and in today's world you do not need to pledge fealty to an employer in order to survive, and the fewer people that do, the more rapidly things will change. If all the IT folks simply walked away from their machines, they would stop working, but we do not, and instead we strive to make their machines work perfectly without our intervention. Jump ship before they decide to push you overboard, anyway - because they will. If you think your employer respects you, and will give you a job for life... you are wilfully deceiving yourself.
    • sz4kerto 13y ago
      Nobody on HN should say that she cannot stand up and walk away. We're have one the most sought-after and best paid jobs in the world. If we cannot give up some comfort, nobody is going to.
      • madaxe 13y ago
        Absolutely. I quit my well paid job for a bank in 2006, as the stink of corruption was too much for me - and quit by just walking out one day, and not coming back. 'lo and behold, banking scandal and collapse, not long later. Fuckers I'd been working for had been hiding $bns of bad debt by shunting it into a director's name every quarter. SEC nabbed 'em. I spent several years broke, getting my own outfit off the ground. Means I'll never work in that industry again. Good riddance.
    • Questioneer 13y ago
      I 'Asked HN' earlier but received no reply from anyone. I would love to hear from anyone, mostly those listed on Bluecabinet on ProjectPM. The latter site started Barrett Brown, currently under prosecution by the US government[1]: Ask HN: Do you work for any of the included companies? (Dell/HBGary/AT&T/etc)[2] [1] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-doj-is-suing-barrett-browns-intelligence-research-site http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-doj-is-suing-barrett-br... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240908
  • einhverfr 13y ago
    Code won't do enough. You are right. What will help will be businesses in privacy-friendly countries which offer secure communications infrastructures. This can be guaranteed by careful development and placement of business assets and, yes, carefully designed code. Many of the people at these businesses you mention are wage slaves and they can't so easily just get up and leave. Code gives us tools. Such is a start, but only a start. We need solid, internationally federated businesses, which can be built to take on this challenge. Yes open sourcing the tools is important too, but only as a means to an end. We need to build up an infrastructure for actually using these tools and that means businesses offering services. I do not have time to do another business (I am ramping up two businesses right now). I do have time to consult, advocate, and advise on this very important topic.
  • igravious 13y ago
    > Lets not try to code our way out of this. I disagree. Let's use all our skills and avenues, not just some of them. > We succumb to terror pushing away meaningless bits of code on Github as a crypto projects in response. That is a subjective opinion. Email itself is meaningless bits of code. You want us to stop using email altogether? What about the web? Why are you even posting on this forum so? > Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets. That is alarmist hyperbole. > Giving you a salary for technician work keeping infrastructure ticking. Enough enabling the beastly mess that is privatized 'national' security. The payments to infrastructure providing companies for data access. The kidnapping/torture/drone fire of others when technological routes don't work. If you have a career with Dell, AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and many others, start making demands or make resumes. Stop being complicit. Dell? A computer hardware device assembler? What on earth are you on about. You appear to think that the entire info-tech infrastructure, companies and "wage-slaves" alike are complicit in all this. Computers are a kind of tool, you can use them for beneficial, neutral or nefarious means. Let's keep the spotlight where it is needed -- on the secrest out-of-control governmental surveillance organs of various nation states. In short. Think a bit before you post and spare us the melodrama.
    • Questioneer 13y ago
      > Dell? A computer hardware device assembler? What on earth are you on about. You appear to think that the entire info-tech infrastructure, companies and "wage-slaves" alike are complicit in all this. "Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government's electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell Inc in April 2012, almost a year earlier than previously reported, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter. David Frink, a spokesman for Round Rock, Texas-based Dell, declined to comment on any aspect of Snowden's employment with the company, saying Dell's "customer" - presumably the NSA - had asked Dell not to talk publicly about him.[1]" Thanks for the heaping pile of denigration. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/15/usa-security-snowden-dell-idUSL2N0GF11220130815 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/15/usa-security-snowd...
  • kaoD 13y ago
    Lets try to code our way out of this. Crypto sucks hard for beginners and it's pretty much in diapers.
  • tzs 13y ago
    Why is Dell on that list?
    • Questioneer 13y ago
      "Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government's electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell Inc in April 2012, almost a year earlier than previously reported, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter. ... David Frink, a spokesman for Round Rock, Texas-based Dell, declined to comment on any aspect of Snowden's employment with the company, saying Dell's "customer" - presumably the NSA - had asked Dell not to talk publicly about him.[1]" [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/15/usa-security-snowden-dell-idUSL2N0GF11220130815 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/15/usa-security-snowd...
      • tzs 13y ago
        So basically Dell sells computers to the government?
        • mathiasben 13y ago
          They run their own version of AWS that's sold to the NSA.
          • tezzer 13y ago
            Also, they recently bought Perot Systems (remember H. Ross Perot?), a large government contractor with fingers in many pies.
  • jgg 13y ago
    Hello, random new account advising us not to come up with electronic solutions to electronic government surveillance! >Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets. What in the fuck does this even mean? How is it relevant? The only problem with "fresh" crypto projects is that if you fuck it up, and you have bad crypto, it's as good as no crypto. Most of us here don't work for those companies, nor do most people being spied on, so this advice sucks. Legislation and regulation are the long-term methods of stopping this, but the short-term method of dealing with a technological problem is better technology.
    • Questioneer 13y ago
      > What in the fuck does this even mean? How is it relevant? It means projects with sound footing are likely to be undermined aggressively by all means. Through courts, around courts, under courts. Undermined using infrastructure and resources provided by many potential contributor's day jobs. A bit like trying to build a castle on the weekend while getting paid to help knock it down during the weekdays. Wondering why it didn't amount to much some time later.
      • jgg 13y ago
        > It means projects with sound footing are likely to be undermined aggressively by all means. So we shouldn't even try?
• arkitaip 13y ago
  Sad but also very understandable. Thanks pj for all your hard work throughout the years and for being one of the most diligent watchdogs in the foss community.
• oneandoneis2 13y ago
  OMG.. Groklaw shut down!? I'm in shock.
  • igravious 13y ago
    A part-solution. All tech geeks set up mail servers with encryption and volunteer to migrate their non-tech friends and family to new email homes. We also show how to configure encryption in their mail clients and start getting them to use native email clients rather than webmail. This will have two effects. It will send a message to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo!/insert big mail provider here/... that they have been lax in protecting the privacy and interests of their users. Of course, given the free-as-in-beer model of webmail it was long apparent to some that the user was actually the product and the advertiser was the actual customer. If a user is seen as a mere data-point then there is little incentive to assure these mere data-points privacy. maybe this will be the kick in the pants the big providers need. Maybe that model is irredeemably broken and always has been but we just didn't know it yet. Email should be like snail mail. Everybody acts as their own mail server and mail client in snail mail land. Your inbox is the physical letterbox and you would never let some corporation provide that value in return for some dubious positive (convenience? a nice interface to your mail store? the ability to search your mail store? ...) The second effect is that it sends a message to the spooks and claws back a vital channel of our privacy. We can work on safe and easy anonymous browsing and safe and anonymous and federated social networking and whatever else further down the road -- mail needs to come first. Think about it. There are enough tech geeks. Every geek should need to know how to do this anyhow. This will scale. We need to build a movement around this. When something in the political arena forces the immeasurably invaluable Groklaw offline something tangible needs to be done. We have had a series of ever more alarming wake-up calls (though I hate how clichéd that sounds) since the first Snowden revelations. We need to start acting on these calls. Sure our response needs a political dimension (a global moratorium on digital mass surveillance) as well but I think that this technical part-solution has got legs. What do you think?
    • nwh 13y ago
      > All tech geeks set up mail servers with encryption and volunteer to migrate their non-tech friends and family to new email homes. I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with my peers having the opportunity to control my email and the myriad of accounts associated with it. I can't imagine they would be happy with me doing the same with their data. > We also show how to configure encryption in their mail clients Encryption is fairly useless without authentication, and we can safely assume that the NSA has control of Certificate Authorities. > Think about it. There are enough tech geeks. Every geek should need to know how to do this anyhow. This will scale. I've been battling with the concept of hosting my email for quite some time, and it always boils down to being a horrific thing to set up. There's a pile of easy ways you can screw up and make something insecure or spam-ridden. I spent a good day trying to put together a solution I was happy with, but couldn't.
• gokhan 13y ago
  Want to keep your rights and freedom? It's time to act, now. History is full of great things going all the way down. Don't wait for the Superman.
  • lazyjones 13y ago
    > It's time to act, now Suggested courses of action? Tried and didn't work: * voting * not voting * protesting online / offline * writing about these issues, raising awareness What options do we have left? Violence? Hopefully there's more.
    • einhverfr 13y ago
      It is in the little things. But it is also in everything together. My rule is that if I protest, I write my congressmen. If I voted based on issues I wrote about I write them and explain my votes. I have at times gotten interesting responses that show I have sometimes managed to get folks to stop and think which is all one can hope to do. But beyond that we need to do what is needed now. We need to get guaranteed secure email services going in nations which have strong privacy protections. We need to create networks of end-to-end encrypted voice traffic which use open source architectures designed for privacy. The NSA has handed the good guys one heck of a market. All that is needed is the time and effort.
    • yuvadam 13y ago
      In this battle, there is no quick win, no proverbial low-hanging fruit. Never forget that by changing your actions, and your awareness, you are influencing other to do the same.
    • ferno 13y ago
      What about waiting for something drastically bad to happen? That'll wake people up, won't it? I think the issue here is that the US populace on average is much too complacent. People don't "care", they don't see how it affects them, etc.
      • justinlilly 13y ago
• sz4kerto 13y ago
  For me, personally, this is much more sad than Lavabit shutting down. Groklaw was an icon, it has huge significance. I do not know whether this - i.e. shutting down - is a good strategy in general. It raises some awareness, it might cause some change ... but what if change does not happens? What other means of protest will we have?
  • anfedorov 13y ago
    He's not shutting down to raise awareness, but because he feels unable to conduct the blog without feeling his communications with his readers are private.
    • Blahah 13y ago
      she/her
    • cwoac 13y ago
      She. I remain surprised by how often this mistake is made, given her name is on every page and the whole thing a few years back where someone accused her of being a fiction made up by IBM. Also, I wonder what the other contributors she had given post privileges to think of this (I thought she had stepped down/away from some of the cases groklaw was covering).
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  • stusmall 13y ago
    My take away from this is she is doing it for her own sanity more than an act of protest. She isn't doing this with the thought that her closing down the site will help spur conversation or change minds but that she can't continue to live a happy, digital life and that the site can't function as intended with the current surveillance. She views privacy and intimacy as a crucial part of both retaining your own humanity and also a part of having a frank and honest discussion. But I have to say, this is getting to me too... more than I would think something like this would.
• rlpb 13y ago
  How feasible is Freenet for email? We can use PGP today, but the metadata is available to all. But what journalists who need to communicate more anonymously that that used pseudonymous PGP keys - one per story, rather one per person, and posted encrypted messages on Freenet?
  • nwh 13y ago
    When you think about totalitarian internet monitoring, like the one the US seem to have, there's almost no point aiming for anonymity. Almost all sensible means are broken when you have deep levels of traffic interception in many countries. The Tor Anonymity Router mentions the types of monitoring they attempt to subvert, and mention that full internet monitoring is not one of their design goals. This is simply because with any low-latency system, correlation between the entry and exit can be obtained. Similar attacks exist for networks such as Bitcoin for similar reasons. > But what journalists who need to communicate more anonymously that that used pseudonymous PGP keys - one per story In this case you run into troubles with authenticity. Without persistent keys being authenticated in some way (see "web of trust"), there's no way in telling if the person is communicating with a government proxy or the real target journalist. That's the issue with the "encrypt everything" mantra, authenticity is stupid difficult to verify.
  • kaoD 13y ago
    It's just non-feasible. Freenet is a distributed file/web database, not realtime internet.
    • rlpb 13y ago
      Email does not have to be real time.
      • kaoD 13y ago
        Maybe realtime was not the best choice of a word, but Freenet cannot handle email in any case. Freenet is a global distributed p2p file database. Email does not fit that medium.
• random42 13y ago
  A sad day indeed. The government has become "the terrorists".
  • yuvadam 13y ago
    The government has always been the terrorists.
  • perlpimp 13y ago
    White house and three letter agencies is the next "Al Qaeda"
• r0h1n 13y ago
  When folks like Lavabit and Groklaw preemptively shut down because they cannot take the security & privacy of their communications for granted, it makes me wonder the converse: how are other companies that deal in sensitive information (patents, lawsuits, competitive bids etc.) dealing with it? Have they resigned themselves to it? Are they devising new corporate communication policies that assume always-on surveillance? Are they thinking things will improve after this storm has passed?
  • nwh 13y ago
    I doubt many companies care about it. My personal information for my apartment is stored on an FTP server and their offices use WEP encryption on their WiFI. They have a scan of my passport, every facet of information about me; if their storage was compromised it would be fairly devastating to their tens of thousands of clients. Unfortunately I have no clout regarding the storage of this information, and no choice as to who I store it with.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• Questioneer 13y ago
  So about botnet data, here is one NSA related company that deals with data the coders are jailed over, Endgame Systems[1]. "botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million." Folks like the industrious pj have much to worry about when 'outside channels' are made into a a for-profit process. Combine 'parallel investigations' with 'outside channels' with a healthy dash of money for the ringleaders and some for the heads of the companies they pay (Google) and you plenty of reason not to talk law or much else over Email. It is becoming a desperate situation for noncombatants. [1] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems
• zmmmmm 13y ago
  Wow. Crazy. PJ presents it generically, but I can't help wondering if that is for legal reasons and something specific has happened that cannot be told. Either way, a tragedy - the world needs, right now, exactly people like PJ and websites like Groklaw.
  • anfedorov 13y ago
    From the way he presented it, I would be very surprised if there was anything specific that cannot be told.
    • jacquesm 13y ago
      she
      • nkurz 13y ago
        True, but is it a good impulse? http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
        • jacquesm 13y ago
          In this case, yes. PJ being a woman is very well known and it irks me when people automatically assume that anybody that runs a thing as successful as groklaw has to be a guy without checking. If you don't know use a gender neutral word or check, it's simple. It's not purity in language, it is paying basic respect to a person who is named several times in full in this thread.
          • lignuist 13y ago
            > ... If you don't know use a gender neutral word ... "it"?
            • a3n 13y ago
              "They" generally works, it's just not commonly used and so sounds a little odd. Try using "they" instead of instead of "he" and "her" for a few minutes to see. It works.
• mixmax 13y ago
  While I understand her (1) personal reasons for shutting down Groklaw, this is an extraordinarily bad decision for privacy and democracy. In the last few weeks quite a few providers of private communications and/or freedom (for some definition of freedom) have shut down. Lavabot, Freedom Hosting, etc. If the US could shut down The Guardian they would. This leaves fewer and fewer secure channels for private communication, and less and less information about what is actually going on. This is an incredibly dangerous road to walk down, and is akin to the Intelligentsia leaving Germany in the 20's. We all know how that ended. (1) edited his to her - thanks for pointing it out rolux
  • rolux 13y ago
    > While I understand his personal reasons pj = Pamela Jones But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London. It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.
    • willvarfar 13y ago
      > we need entirely new communication protocols Whole new enforcement of privacy laws, you mean?
      • rolux 13y ago
        No, I mean protocols. While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. (But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)
        • willvarfar 13y ago
          Its a subject I keep an eye on, e.g. freenet and off-the-record messaging. I think these systems cannot work :( If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion-email http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies. Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(
• jgg 13y ago
  Since we weren't allowed to say it when it was relevant, and the point was muddled and trampled on in pseudo-rational debates (“Can you find evidence that they’re abusing this new legislation?”, etc.), I'll go ahead and say it now: it's happening. There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, making the abuse and surveillance of Internet more relevant than it needs to be. I find it hilarious that in most of the threads I've read on here for months, that people who have actually lived in oppressive regimes say that the US is at least displaying a likelihood of being on the slow descent to Hell, while people in the US are quick to point out that it's still fine because we have elections and we aren't being forced out onto the streets and shot in the back of the head. Read any book on history, strategy, authoritarianism or "real" conspiracies and it's abundantly clear that the best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume; I will not be surprised when we find out in 30-50 years that the tech companies were not only complicit in passive surveillance, but in active manipulation to control public opinion and perception. Further, people self-actualize and learn to evolve to higher ideals, so once you debase intelligent debate/freedom of expression and make every personal detail of a person's life that passes over an electronic medium open to dissection and survellience, you debase the minds of the people as a whole and open the door to committing worse atrocities. It's actually less difficult than it was 50-100 years ago to control public opinion. Before, you'd have to burn books and control every major newspaper and broadcasting corporation. Now you can just astroturf on Reddit or Twitter, or edit Wikipedia is subtle ways, and have the same effect.
  • bostik 13y ago
    > best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume That brought back a quote from a past: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." I had to look it up to get the exact wording right. Was only half surprised that it comes from Orwell's 1984.
    • digitalengineer 13y ago
      Agreed. Some time ago on HN: Law firms forcing online newspapers to delete older articles. No one cares, it's old news right? Step by step they're changing history.
• jacquesm 13y ago
  Holy crap. Groklaw? I'd never for one second thought that the fall out from the NSA debacle would reach so far as to cause Groklaw to be shut down. PJ feels extremely genuine here, she is definitely not using this as an excuse. Wow. There is something very unhealthy in the air or in the water these days. Lots of people seem to be totally immune to the consequences of rampant surveillance and frankly bizarre powers executed by the current set of governments. And all that in the name of the war on some nebulous entity that could not even capitulate if it wanted to (and that's assuming such central command and control even exists). 2013 is fast shaping up to be a year of notoriety, so many things happening in so many places that are all linked to governments overstepping their powers. Who would have thought 20 years ago that we'd see US whistleblowers hiding in Russia of all places. That there would be meaningful comparisons drawn between the Russian government and the UK government when it comes to dealing with the press, that we'd see torture committed by the people we routinely thought of as the good guys. It's a weird world we are living in at the moment. Since comments are turned off there: Thank you PJ for all the extremely hard work and the dedication. A lot of good came from this, I'm quite sure that there were some cases where both the plaintive and the defense were spending as much time reading groklaw as they were reading their email. It certainly counted for something.
  • yuvadam 13y ago
    That 'something unhealthy' is called privilege, and most people assume that it will protect them from government atrocities. Little do they know that privilege is given at the behest of the oppressor, and can be revoked instantaneously. I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this.
    • rolux 13y ago
      > I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this. Absolutely. Just as 2013 is the year where "ordinary people" have begun to understand that "the cloud" is a scam. (And that is doesn't make that much of a difference if they store their data with Google, Apple, or directly with the NSA. If the blueprints of PRISM can't be kept from leaking, then subsets of the actual data will leak as well. Five or ten years from know, you'll have a huge grey market of -- medium to low quality, outdated, etc. -- surveillance data.)
• pron 13y ago
  I have said this on HN several times, and I will say this again. Dragnet surveillance of private digital correspondence by the US and other governments is wrong, and a gross, unjustified, overreaction to the real threat of terrorism. And yet, when taken as part of the whole picture that is the internet, government surveillance is little more than a drop in the ocean. While governments may collect a possibly significant amount of correspondence and analyze some of it, almost all online data, e-mail correspondence as well as photos and documents, search history, browsing history, our physical location, the driving, running and cycling routes we take, the busses we use and more, is constantly collected, analyzed monitored and used, all day every day, by private corporations. These corporations are even less subject to oversight than any democratically elected institution, and their employees are less carefully screened. Government surveillance is wrong, but at least it raises an outrage that, in time, is almost certain to bring about change. Corporate surveillance is a more dangerous beast. It employs manipulation and deceit rather than plain-old secrecy, and worst of all – it causes little outrage. Some have compared the current state of things to George Orwell's Big Brother government, but those who've read the book know that Big Brother does not rule through secrecy and intimidation. Big Brother is never mistrusted, never hated, and never feared or suspected. People subject themselves to his control willingly. Big Brother is loved. That is how absolute power is gained. And that is why a democratic institution has little hope of ever attaining Big Brother status, especially in America where any government is automatically suspect. The real danger to our privacy and our freedom, the true potential Big Brother and the danger that dwarfs any government surveillance online, is Google, Facebook and their ilk.
  • route66 13y ago
    > ... Google, Facebook and their ilk ... usually don't destroy hard drives of journalists or don't detain people as a matter of harrassment just to name two recent actions undertaken by governments who use their introspective powers to take conclusions ("we have to have this Miranda guy") and act upon them ("we know he's in Berlin. Check the flight records") The point is that the control of the governments does not seem to work anymore OR, at the same time addressing that "Big Brother is loved": nobody cares, because governmental agencies do the right thing. (That is my impression until now, living in Europe)
• rahoulb 13y ago
  > But for me, the Internet is over. This is how I've been feeling about it for the last few weeks.
  • ttt_ 13y ago
    The internet is imploding.
• MichaelGG 13y ago
  I guess I don't get it. Didn't we "know" about things like Carnivore in the 90s? Isn't it rather expected that unencrypted communications are going to be gathered? You don't even need a nation-state to do so. Anyone with physical access can place taps, and parsing and saving port 25 traffic ain't exactly Manhattan Project level work. I agree it's upsetting and citizens should be demanding oversight. But to assume your plaintext transmissions over uncontrolled wires are somehow private seems absurd. It's like the silliness people got whipped into over Google's WiFi collection which was essentially passing "-s 0" instead of "-s 64" to tcpdump.
  • igravious 13y ago
    I know. We're all so gullible and dumb right? Tell me. You're speaking with a friend in a public square or park in your town. You're not speaking in code with your friend. Judging by what you just said I expect you assume your every conversation is being monitored. We have certain expectations of privacy and basic human decency. Just because it's possible to wiretap and hoover up all unencrypted communications I wouldn't have concluded that the spooks are doing so because I would have thought they wouldn't stoop to this behaviour. Sure there was a little bit of info here and there but there's nothing like hard evidence (Snowden-style) for changing ones mind. You don't have to show us all how smart you are, we know already -- so you can keep these types of comments to yourself.
    • cookiecaper 13y ago
      >Tell me. You're speaking with a friend in a public square or park in your town. You're not speaking in code with your friend. Judging by what you just said I expect you assume your every conversation is being monitored. You should be aware of the possibility that someone may be eavesdropping in this situation, yes. >We have certain expectations of privacy and basic human decency. Our expectations of privacy are valid in private contexts, like a home or business. Public contexts, like a busy shopping center or the internet, do not contain inherent guarantees of privacy. Even though one can normally assume that no one dangerous is listening in, it's a risk you always take when you engage in any conversation or behavior in a visible location. >Just because it's possible to wiretap and hoover up all unencrypted communications I wouldn't have concluded that the spooks are doing so because I would have thought they wouldn't stoop to this behaviour. This is pretty naive. Whenever there is a large benefit:cost ratio in play, people should expect that someone at some point _will_ stoop to that level. The ability to record and filter huge portions of worldwide communication is obviously hugely beneficial to all nation-states, so they're obviously going to do it. There are even some who would argue that this is not fundamentally immoral, so it's an even less clear-cut case than things that are obviously fundamentally immoral, meaning it should've been even more expected. These monitoring programs have been occurring for a long time, most likely since Snowden was a child. >You don't have to show us all how smart you are, we know already -- so you can keep these types of comments to yourself. I think just the opposite. We should be using this as an opportunity to educate everyone on the critical importance of encryption (analogous to placing your comms in a sealed envelope, instead of leaving them bare on a postcard), not express moral outrage that some people would "stoop so low". I guess if you're into that, you can do that too (I find it trite, personally), but it shouldn't be done at the expense of the resolution to this problem, which is widespread adoption of full client-side encryption.
• JunkDNA 13y ago
  This to me is the most pernicious thing about this whole surveillance business. The mere presence of a comprehensive surveillance apparatus, even when you don't live in a totalitarian state when jack booted thugs pay you a visit to "get your mind right", does incalculable damage to the first amendment. In a free society, it's "game over" without the first amendment. This is in some ways even more damaging than the actual surveillance (which in theory could be shut off today) because once the public feels they've lost the freedom of speech, it is extremely hard to convince them otherwise. Look at how hard it has been for the citizenry of forer communist countries to embrace and internalize the freedoms we in the US have had for a few hundred years.
• deerpig 13y ago
  This is such depressing news. And I've been trying to think of a way to solve this technically, but the Government has the five dollar wrench, and all we have is the crypto. Code will not be enough, the system only respects one thing, money. If enough people move to services outside of the States, the real people in power will tell the government to reinstate at least some civil liberties and human rights. But even then, don't expect too much. As mixmax said, this is "akin the Intelligentsia leaving Germany in the 20's." It will start with moving to hosting and services outside the country and will eventually be followed by people physically leaving the country. As James Joyce said, "silence, cunning... exile"! It's not so bad. I've been an expat for 26 years and I've never looked back.
  • ttt_ 13y ago
    >> If enough people move to services outside of the States What service can we trust at this point? After the Evo Morales flight debacle, it's pretty clear that their five dollar wrench works equally well on other nations as well. The internet is broken, everywhere.
• brown9-2 13y ago
  Can anyone explain for the uninformed how anything like surveillance affects Groklaw? I was under the (probably wrong) impression that most of what Groklaw did was explain the law and court cases in simple terms.
  • mortov 13y ago
    Groklaw started with some serious in-depth background knowledge of the whole SCO - Linux stuff (there's too much to describe it as anything else). That sort of information comes from having serious inside, in-depth background information. You know, the sort of stuff serious investigative journalists /used/ to do. Like the Washington Post in 1972 when they reported on illegal activity by the President (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal#Role_of_the_media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal#Role_of_the_m...) rather than the Washington Post in 2013 when the report on Presidential Broccoli (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/07/09/president-obama-says-he-loves-broccoli/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/07...). We've seen a rare example of serious investigative journalism and how /our/ countries respond to it by targeting family and loved ones of the journalists. That's the way we used to say only the KGB or the Gestapo behaved in the Bad Old Days. Guess what ? The Bad Old Days are right here and right now. No wonder PJ is concerned that continuing Groklaw may expose her to serious risk from the authorities. Commenting on court cases and filling in the background through back-channel information from Deep Throat (or whatever pseudonym they use today) sure does not seem to be worth that risk to me. It's sad that any comment on this stuff makes it sound like you go around wearing a tin-foil hat.
    • tzs 13y ago
      I may have missed it, but I don't recall any back channel information from Deep Throat type sources there. What I recall was a lot of documents readily available to lawyers but somewhat a pain in the ass for average people to track down and get copies of, especially for free. Note that I am not saying there were none...just that I never noticed them. Anyone have an example or two?
      • 13y ago
• pgcsmd 13y ago
  Groklaw has been a jewel in the crown of the free internet. We are all unbelievably impoverished by its passing. This is truly awful.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    On the plus side, so far as it goes, I don't think we could make a better case for "chilling effects"...
• herrschindler 13y ago
  Comment of the CEO of the service PJ chose for her communications: http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=625 http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=625 "While we’re happy to provide a privacy asylum in a safe legislation, society should not need them. Privacy should be the default, not the exception." So it's come down to privacy asylums and digital refugee camps now. WTF?
  • skore 13y ago
    Years ago, when I was a little involved with the FSFE, I did a bit of graphics design for some people there. One thing I made was that small graphic one you see in the header there. Seeing it again now after years... Weird. Then I went to http://planet.fsfe.org/ http://planet.fsfe.org/ and found out they're still using my site design there. Wow. I'm floored. This is... I don't know. With the storm brewing right now, they need help. People help. Guess I know what to do.
• voodoochilo 13y ago
  that's what THEY want: get in bed with the big ones and scare the shit out of/shut up the small ones. result: complete control. what a huge pile of shit for one single day.
• kineticfocus 13y ago
  relevant link...(Google+, Real Names, and Groklaw's Pamela Jones)(2011) http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-real-names-and-groklaws-pamela-jones/1454 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-real-names-and-g...
• cookiecaper 13y ago
  ...Can PJ not figure out GnuPG? Is she officially retiring from any and all digital correspondence contrary to her notice that "[her] email [addresses] still work"? She says she's getting off the internet to whatever extent possible, and then asks people to continue to send her mail. I also find it cute that people believe facilities based in other Western nations are outside of the NSA's reach. I gotta say that stopping Groklaw, which is a public site anyway, because someone else might be reading it, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, despite the emotional ploys in this article. She can write and save drafts locally in a (GASP) local word processor and encrypt anything she chooses to upload to remote storage. The government will then not be able to read unfinished Groklaw articles. Does this resolve the issue? This whole article should've just been a public key and a PO box address with this note: "I will not acknowledge plaintext mail. If you are uncomfortable transmitting encrypted data over the wire, please send a USB disk to this box."
  • FedRegister 13y ago
    >Can PJ not figure out GnuPG? I'm sure she can, but by doing so has reduced the set of people capable of sending her mail significantly by imposing the requirement that they figure out GnuPG before they send her an email.
    • xradionut 13y ago
      If you want to use it, you can figure it out. It requires more work than most people care about.
      • FedRegister 13y ago
        Not in the same way that you can use email though. It is unsafe to use GnuPG on a computer you do not own or trust like a computer at a public library or an Internet cafe. It is, however, possible to register an email address on such a computer and send unencrypted email on that same computer with some precautions and still be fairly sure that the contents will not be connected to you.
• jheriko 13y ago
  at the risk of encouraging brainless anger responses. yes lets all bend over and take it up the ass... because someone says what they learned makes them not want to use e-mail? this is precisely the opposite of how to stand up to oppression. no matter what it is the response should not be "well i'm going to stop being free and let them oppress me" you may as well just lay down and die in my mind... you are born free whether you like it or not and nobody can take that away but yourself.
• augustl 13y ago
  Would just like to mention mailpile: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac... They aim to create an self-hosted e-mail client with (among other things) a new take on encryption usability. I think this is one step in the right directoin of making e-mail encryption easier to use. If you think so too, back them :)
• 001sky 13y ago
  My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write.... -- the crux
• driverdan 13y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me. There's a simple technical solution: stop using email for tips and setup a secure web form on the site. Can someone explain why this wouldn't solve the problem?
  • a3n 13y ago
    She'd be subject to NSLs and court orders and warrants. In fact it could even attract those things. She's cutting to the chase.
    • driverdan 13y ago
      But the medium she uses to accept the tips doesn't impact NSLs or warrants. Web form or email are both subject to the same laws.
• mike-cardwell 13y ago
  Why do they "require" email in order to function? Can't they handle communication via a web based application which is part of the site? A few forms here and there, some https...
• prawn 13y ago
  Chomsky noted in a speech recently (http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_nothing_like_a_democracy/ http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_noth...) that the very vast majority of us have absolutely no impact on the policy of our governments. Only the upper tiers have influence and the utter richest minority are likely to get what they want. In both the US and where I am in Australia, the two major parties are barely different and doubly so in regards to this whole issue. A vote is not going to mean a great deal. But a vote that can make some difference is voting with our wallets. Can very conscious purchasing decisions made by more and more people remove some of the influence held by the very richest on our planet? Is that too dreamy? Where possible, I try to avoid purchasing from the biggest brand in any category, but there'd be a lot, lot more I could do about this. If we imagine the typical food pyramid, but fill it with brands and apply it to every product and category showing the richest and most influential at one end and the delightful smallfry at the other, could we help motivate people to make better decisions about where they spend their money? Or even where they earn it? Earn a fraction less to work for a smaller supplier perhaps. Apps, surveys, social media, gamification - these are all things that might help people make more careful decisions. Ride a bike, grow food or buy from independent greengrocers at least, seek out furniture that's locally made, etc. Give me a site/app that asks me about my life and rates my efforts or motivates me to make a better choice in everything I do. Help me identify brands that feel independent but are actually owned by corporate monsters.
  • nbouscal 13y ago
    The idea is great, but unfortunately it won't work for the majority of Americans. Paycheck-to-paycheck is a reality for way too many people. I know a lot of people who are opposed to Walmart, and wish that they could afford not to shop there, but they can't. The price is just too compelling. Feeding their kids is a lot more important to them than making a political statement.
    • prawn 13y ago
      Sure, but there are other small steps that can make incremental differences. Cheaper than driving a car (insurance, registration, fuel bought from a megacorp) is riding a bike now and then. Or getting coffee from the little place on the corner rather than the chain. Or even buying from the third biggest fast food company in the country rather than the first biggest.
• rainsford 13y ago
  Maybe I'm just not "getting it", but this seems like an incredibly odd decision. It is not a revelation that plaintext email can technically be looked at by people beyond the sender and recipient. And it's not clear what in any reported stories would specifically relate to Groklaw's use of email. What it seems to come down to is the general fear that the NSA COULD, from a technical perspective, be reading specific unencrypted emails. But before the recent news stories, did PJ (or anyone else) really send and receive emails thinking "there is no way the NSA, or anyone else, can see this email"? As far as chilling effects go, the knowledge that a multi-billion dollar signals intelligence agency is technically capable of reading an unencrypted email seems pretty mild. Is free speech and free communication really so fragile that it rests on the idea that casual communication you make no special effort to protect is totally out of the reach of large police or intelligence organizations?
  • jebblue 13y ago
    My thoughts too, to me, ordinary email is like a conversation in the park. People can listen to that if they want, it's the public. Ordinary email goes over the public Internet. It seems to me to be a bit of elegant arm waving. To me the restrictions on encryption are of more concern. It's like saying we can't have a private conversation except within the bounds of what the government says is OK.
    • nbouscal 13y ago
      > ordinary email is like a conversation in the park. That's really, really distant from how the average non-technical user thinks of email. They just drop the e and think of it as mail.
• astral303 13y ago
  That is really sad. We need some kind of a "want my privacy back" backlash or a movement. A slogan that we can unite against and spread the message across the populace. It's the kind of slogan you use against not only the mass surveillance by the NSA, but also against vehicle miles traveled tax that puts a GPS in your car and against those insurance company OBD-II dongles (Progressive Snapshot) that record your driving and transmit it back. Against surveillance cameras on every city block. Against the idea that "if you have nothing to hide", then you will have no problem with surveillance.
• pilif 13y ago
  > is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the US, don't do this. Since 1999, email providers in Switzerland are forced to keep all logs and data for one year (currently in discussion to prolong this to 5 years) and hand all data over at the authorities request. If you don't comply you will be punished by fines or even jail. I once (early 2000s) received one of these orders and I honestly don't remember whether it had a judges signature, but I think it was just some police officer signing it, so I can't be sure whether there was (and is) any court oversight. If you want your conversations to be confidential, don't choose a Swiss provider.
• JonFish85 13y ago
  Well that's puerile. Talk about taking things to extremes--just like a child would do. "We can't go to grandma's right now? WE'RE NEVER GOING TO GRANDMA'S EVER!" "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7." Yeah? Well if you're using this as your benchmark, then you should never go out in public, because I guarantee you're on videotape someplace. Security cameras are everywhere. And let's not play games: your ISP has been monitoring your browsing & download history for decades. Nevermind phone calls, any tolls you paid while driving, any bill you paid via credit card, any flight you've taken, any country you've traveled. Now this is broken and suddenly you care? Stop fucking playing the victim card for attention, I'm sick of it. And I'm not just talking about the Groklaw people, this goes for whoever jumps on the "OMG I'm shutting down now" bandwagon for a portion of the 15 minutes of fame going around. You want to make a difference? Start getting involved in politics. Internet-rage does nothing but get you a few website hits before people go back to caring about the A-Rod scandal, or the Obamas' new dog.
• logn 13y ago
  I posted this in response to the American being groped on travel to India, got -3 karma points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240211 Now I'm reading this story, in which pj explains her story which was exactly my point from the comment linked above. What's the deal? Anyhow, yes, when the sum of human communication is read by the US government (and other governments and private intel corporations) then it's incredibly destructive to the human condition and society. We're fucked. Time to start fixing this for real. Open up your IDE's and/or text editors and get to work. Make sure to open source (GPL or Affero GPL) everything. Work on decentralized P2P encrypted networking. Good projects: cjdns ... see you on the flip side. Hack the Planet!
  • jdbernard 13y ago
    It was downvoted likely because it was off-topic and added nothing to that discussion.
  • grey-area 13y ago
    Since you genuinely don't seem to understand, here's the deal: that story was about someone's personal experience of sexual harassment, and you posted a flippant analogy comparing it to invasion of online privacy. NSA surveillance is a big deal, but nothing to do with sexual harassment.
    • logn 13y ago
      Thanks, I appreciate your feedback and the other commenter's. It didn't occur to me it would be interpreted as flippant or off-topic. Anyhow, IMO it was a serious and equivalent analogy, as I think pj's story shows. Anyhow, I was just curious, I don't actually care about downvotes.
      • grey-area 13y ago
        I think the problem is that it is no way equivalent, and sexual assault is psychologically far more damaging. I don't think you can compare the complex damage to body and self-worth triggered by that meaningfully to the limited intrusion most of us feel at having machines storing and cataloguing our every move. With respect, I don't think pg's story shows the two are similar at all - she's taken a decision to withdraw from being a conduit for leaks (probably because she doesn't want her life destroyed by a NSL), but has not had sexual contact forced on her. It's just a completely different thing. The biggest dangers I see with the surveillance state are more in the future, when complex filters are run on our data in decades to come, and segregate us into cohorts of users which can then be targeted and related at will. When that capability catches up with the data storage capability and starts to churn through decades of data, we truly will be in a dystopia far beyond our imagining today.
• wyck 13y ago
  The solution at least for the time being is not going to be over the pipes, it will have to be real world. A 1 GB USB costs approximately 4$ , you can encrypt the information and use the regular mail with no return address. To avoid cameras in the post office you can use a 3rd party or a real world dropbox. This sounds so sci-fi dystopian it's hard to believe it actually a plausible solution. ps. Don't forget to use gloves, make sure "they" can't track your purchase, and also check if the drive is clean as a whistle.
• frank_boyd 13y ago
  It could be they were served a "National Security Letter". Could this happen to a site like HN? And if so, would we know?
• mindstab 13y ago
  So how we we achieve political change? As Charlie Stross points out, some very wrong has hijacked our political system: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders...
• lkrubner 13y ago
  It is almost a cliche at this point, but it is worth remembering Martin Niemöller's words. He made the same mistake that many people are making today: thinking they don't have to worry because they are not the people whom the government is persecuting today. And the unfolding of events taught Martin Niemöller a very painful lesson. In an ideal world, the public would hear his words and learn the lesson without having to repeat all the mistakes of the past. He wrote: First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
• throw7 13y ago
  This is not surprising since "pj" guards his privacy and anonymity. Two things the surveillance state doesn't want you to have.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    pj is a woman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Jones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Jones
• grellas 13y ago
  It is really tragic that we have reached a point where something so wonderful as Groklaw cannot effectively function. Nearly 200 years ago, de Tocqueville asked why the American experiment in self-government succeeded while its French counterpart led to the guillotine, mob excesses, and ultimate tyranny and he gave a complex answer whose core was that private moral restraints in the populace served to check the unbounded passions in people that lead to oppression. In other words, the private life that each of us leads will hugely influence the way we are governed. Governments are always ready to grab the greatest degree of power that the people will give them. That is the default because it is hard-wired into the human condition. And this is the major factor not grasped by those today who assume that society is evolving to a point that, if only right-thinking people with good motives are given enough power over our lives, they will somehow magically transform society for the good through government action. In reality, if any persons - right-thinking or not - are given largely unchecked authority over our lives, abuses will inevitably follow. As they gather huge amounts of power, their purpose in life becomes to guard that power jealously and to increase it as opportunities permit. No bureau has ever abolished itself. Farm programs from the depression era thrive today as ever, though the logic for their existence has long since vanished. Politicians of all stripes promote expanded budgets for their own areas of preferred government expansion and spend money they don't even have in vast quantities with little or no accountability to the people they supposedly serve. This is why it is vital in a free society that its people be educated and morally grounded to value their rights as individuals and to resist and distrust unchecked authority in the state. Do we have that today? Perhaps, but only in a very weakened form. Many people today do not even give pause over the idea that the government claims huge amounts of unchecked power, whether it is to fight terrorists or to expand social programs. There is very little residue in our society of the old-fashioned principled belief that it is wrong to have vast centralized power with very few checks upon it. In her sign off piece, PJ notes: "Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That's not the rule of law as I understood the term." This is lamentable but it is a mere symptom, and not the cause, of our ills. Politicians make the law as they go, with no accountability, only because they are allowed to do so by those whom they govern. And, if someone already has vast power over you, it is but a small step to extend that power in a technological age by using technology to spy upon, intimidate, and control people. Why, when these leaders are allowed to lord it over us as they see fit, should they suddenly develop scruples in gathering information that only serves to enhance their power to do what we are already letting them do without so much as a peep of principled opposition? Privacy is in significant peril, and it is a serious loss when Groklaw goes down over this issue. But assaults on privacy are but a symptom of a deeper malady as modern society increasingly believes that it can hand over massive forms of unchecked government to its politicians in the naive belief that such power can be used wisely if only we have right-thinking leaders at the helm. The answer, as de Tocqueville noted years ago, is not to place faith in leaders but rather to take personal responsibility in our lives and to curtail the powers of those who govern. I guess we shall just have to wait and see if this is possible today. In the meantime, we can praise those who fight the good fight, and PJ has been a supreme example of this. Tireless, talented, and astute, she has been a wonderful force for good over the past decade. May she find a powerful new outlet for those talents as she moves forward, even in a difficult environment.
• runn1ng 13y ago
  Frankly, I don't understand that. E-mails are unsafe for private communication. What the recent revelations did is that they showed that e-mails really are unsafe. If you are really afraid that you are under surveillance, switch to PGP. It's not hard.
• bengrunfeld 13y ago
  Without sounding trollish, I believe there is a need for a completely new 'transfer of information' protocol that is as immune as possible to NSA (or other agency) snooping. She's right, the internet is broken. So rather than posting endless articles about how it sucks, and suffering heart-breaking tragedies like Groklaw shutting down, why don't we build something new, something truly beautiful, by which I mean something truly private? To summarize my point, quoting PJ, "privacy is vital to being human, which is why one of the worst punishments there is is total surveillance..."
  • thaumaturgy 13y ago
    I2P. It's been built. I've been asking for years for people to start adopting it. Nobody has been interested. http://www.i2p2.de/ http://www.i2p2.de/
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • bengrunfeld 13y ago
      I think they'll start listening now. Will look over it. Thanks.
• thezilch 13y ago
  At first I thought, pj is using the "NSA" scapegoat as a copout. Email is the reason??? Use GPG! But then I remember how difficult it is to get even my most technical friends to care about secure communications. GPG is a two-way street; for pj to communicate with groklaw constituents or partners or partners of partners, they'd ALL have to be using GPG. Otherwise, someone without it is going to leak what was assumed to be a secure thread. The weakest link conundrum.
• TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
  What does the NSA have to do with Groklaw? They don't get anonymous tips from whistleblowers do they? This is weird. Someone please explain.
• etchalon 13y ago
  Such utter bullshit.
• gwu78 13y ago
  Can you follow the logic of the pj post? Snowden uses Lavabit email service. Snowden leaks top secret material belonging to US and UK. US demands Snowden's emails from Lavabit. Lavabit shuts down. pj reads news of Lavabit and concludes that email is not anonymous. (Email was never truly anonymous, unless you count anonymous remailers. Surely she knew this.) pj concludes that she should shut down Groklaw. (Why not just warn everyone that she will comply with legal requirements, like Google and myriad other web-based businesses do, for example. Millions of people still use these services even with that warning.) pj concludes that she should no longer use "the internet" (cf. email). (Huh? Email is but one use of the internet; it was designed ages ago and was never intended to be anonymous.) Are people who leak top secret material and are wanted by US authorities sending emails to pj? If not, then please help me understand pj's logic. If Snowden sent emails to pj, and pj, like Lavabit, does not wish to comply with authorities and hand over whatever they've got, then I guess shutting down Groklaw makes sense. I guess. You cannot have a right to privacy as Brandeis envisioned it when you lack any reasonable expectation of privacy. Reading pj's post it sounds like she's abandoned _all_ expectations of privacy with respect to the internet (which includes email among so many other potential uses). This reeks of "all-or-nothing" thinking. Lawmakers have no reason to exceed the expectations of their employers. If you the voter and taxpayer expect zero privacy, you should not be surprised if that's what is delivered.
  • consonants 13y ago
    It's not a completely logic-motivated decision, but that does not make it any less valid. Having your sense of privacy and safety breached is incredibly disturbing on an emotional level. I've been robbed, you end up feeling rightly violated at a very base level and left with a general disgust for everything and anyone involved.
• yuhong 13y ago
  I hope if they really insist on doing this that they will be ready to cover the Lavabit lawsuit when the secrecy is removed.
• fmax30 13y ago
  You cannot just quit internet, you just can-not. Aren't there any secure email providers like lavabit in Europe or Asia . Whenever I think about NSA now , in a corner of my mind , I see Dan Brown Saying, " I told you so". With a copy of Digital fortress (his book about NSA) in his hand.
• ricardobeat 13y ago
  What about using a secure electronic drop box like Wikileaks does? Crypto still works.
• _sh 13y ago
  Americans! Every time someone wants to introduce gun control, you bang on and on about your right to keep and bear arms being necessary to the security of a free State. Well, your free state is in jeopardy. Now is the time to assemble your well-regulated militia to secure it!
• kabisote 13y ago
  The scripture quoted in the article is Jeremiah 10:23. History verifies the truthfulness of that scripture. Government by man has not brought a better world, even when rulers have had high ideals and the best of intentions. Instead, "man has dominated man to his injury." -(Ecclesiastes 8:9)