
Forced Exposure - nikai
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
======
grellas
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.

~~~
brianpgordon
> 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

These are vastly different issues. Providing social programs doesn't infringe
on anyone's rights except by taxation, which the government is
constitutionally entitled to perform to any degree it wants. In contrast, the
tactics employed to supposedly fight terrorism often impact rights which are
protected by law.

~~~
crusso
_These are vastly different issues_

The funny thing is that they aren't. They're all about power. Power given to
the few to control the many. Social programs just have that sugary coating
that voters like to swallow, but the rotten corruption of power is at the
center of all and its effects inevitably dominate.

~~~
brianpgordon
That's the opposite of what's happening. Money (power) is flowing from the few
(the rich) to the many (the poor who actually use government services and
social programs).

~~~
crusso
Bam! ... and there you demonstrated exactly how they fool you. You're thinking
about the social programs themselves - the bait or the distraction.

I'm talking about governmental power: the power to control vast amounts of
money, the power to reward your friends and relatives, the power to snoop on
your innocent citizens and punish your enemies through the force of law and
perhaps physical violence.

They offer you trinkets, you vote for them, they gain power, they spend money
they don't have, they abuse their power, they live like kings, they blame
others for their eternal failures to implement utopia, they claim that if only
you would elect them again and give them more of the money of the evil rich,
they could solve all of society's problems... wash, rinse, repeat.

~~~
brianpgordon
"Doing good things is how they get you! They get re-elected by doing good
things, and that gives them the voter support to do bad things. Down with good
things!"

~~~
crusso
Promising good things is not equal to "good things". Doing a few good things
is really easy when you have shitloads of other peoples' money to work with -
but even then, they fail over and over to deliver what they actually promise.

Detroit's city managers promised and did a whole lot of good things, didn't
they? They were a regular Santa Claus with the handouts.

------
jacquesm
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
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
> 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.)

~~~
JonFish85
"Just as 2013 is the year where "ordinary people" have begun to understand
that "the cloud" is a scam."

Disagree. So-called "ordinary people" don't really know or care about this
issue. They care that "hey, my phone calendar syncs with my Google calendar!".
They care that "hey, I can listen to my music on my computer, my phone AND my
tablet". They care that they don't have to worry about backing up some things
(Google Docs / Microsoft Office 365). They care that their pictures can be
accessed by their friends without having to attach them to email. No average
person is running away from the cloud for this reason--they're running towards
it because overall, they still feel it makes their lives easier.

~~~
chris_mahan
No, but yesterday a friend of mine asked me how to back up her pictures from
her computer. I told her to use a removable drive. My wife said: "Just store
them on Facebook". I said: "The US government makes a copy of anything you
upload to the internet." My wife was shocked. Our friend said: "I don't want
that." (She's from Hungary). We settled on 32 GB flash drives.

Moral of the story: Just like Groklaw, the ordinary people will stop trusting
the internet because people in the know (in her case lavabit founder) say not
to trust it.

Ordinary people, for the most part, trust the geeks they know to guide them
through the computing landscape.

~~~
JonFish85
"The US government makes a copy of anything you upload to the internet"

So accuracy isn't really something you're all that concerned with? It is my
understanding (and certainly could be wrong) that the whole PRISM thing was
the _ability_ for the government to get their hands on any data they wished,
not that they're making copies of everything. I believe _metadata_ is stored,
which is an entirely different animal.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
Wait, you're really gonna call BS on someone who doesn't pin their hopes on
the fine line between 'can make a copy' and 'makes a copy?'

You realize the agencies have been using a bizarro definition of surveillance
where they can capture everything and it's only surveillance once an agent
listens to it? (
[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/07/nsa_lexicon_how_james_clapper_and_other_u_s_officials_mislead_the_american.html)
)

Snowden says they can do it. ISP sources confirm the government is trying to
do it, but they are forbidden from disclosing the exact nature of what is
done. You're really going to believe the people who have been busted lying
about it and say anyone who doesn't is not concerned with 'accuracy?'

And what does metadata mean, anyway? If the government stores everybody you've
been in a picture with, or who's looked at your pictures, but doesn't store
the picture, is that really supposed to make us feel better?

------
jgg
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.

~~~
ihsw
> the best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the
> information they consume

The comparison that some have made between the US Government and Stasi is more
accurate than you think, with regards of _Zersetzung_ :

> By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that methods of overt persecution which
> had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too
> crude and obvious. It was realised that psychological harassment was far
> less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their
> supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance, given
> that they would often not be aware of the source of their problems, or even
> its exact nature. Zersetzung was designed to side-track and "switch off"
> perceived enemies so that they would lose the will to continue any
> "inappropriate" activities.

Source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung)

Data _mining_ is a very interest challenge and represents a major step in
large-scale computing technology, but it pales in comparison to data
_manipulation_.

Imagine for a moment if the intelligence-surveillance apparatus were
redirected outward: methods used for parsing human communication would be re-
purposed for disseminating seemingly-human propaganda. Who you're responding
to on Twitter, reddit, or HN may not be a person.

Imagine for a moment if spammers were quite a bit more convincing in their
emails, and that their poor grammar and spelling were improved.

~~~
001sky
see also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting)

------
cookiecaper
...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."

~~~
nemik
GnuPG is not a solution for this. The problem is not just about the contents
of the message, but knowing your communication habits. GnuPG can't encrypt who
your message is going to, being replied to, when, or even the subject.

The NSA probably isn't storing all the contents of voice calls either, but it
really doesn't matter all that much. They can still tell who you communicate
with when and how often. That's not conducive to democracy or free speech.

Furthermore, because of how few people use GnuPG or other such tools, I would
expect you'd only be targeted harder for using them.

~~~
cookiecaper
> GnuPG is not a solution for this. The problem is not just about the contents
> of the message, but knowing your communication habits. GnuPG can't encrypt
> who your message is going to, being replied to, when, or even the subject.

GnuPG is PART of a solution to this. _If_ you do need to hide the recipient,
sender, subject line, etc., then you'll have to bolster your solution with
other offerings. One suggestion may be to use temporary email addresses
created through Tor, so that the gathered mail header data is not meaningful.
Another suggestion would be to encrypt the data and dump it onto a filehost
and send the link through a non-email channel. But in any case, it is crucial
that the _content_ of one's messages remains private.

>Furthermore, because of how few people use GnuPG or other such tools, I would
expect you'd only be targeted harder for using them.

Indeed this is the case now, but as we get more people set up with GPG, it
will no longer be an effective method of discrimination.

------
mixmax
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_

~~~
quail
Obama continues to push hard to steal what little privacy rights US citizens
have remaining. He is openly hostile about it, and lies about it constantly.

Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going
to get worse.

~~~
tilsammans
We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting
altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes.
That'll destabilize things right quick.

~~~
lukifer
It is a curious quirk of psychology that a single vote for a two major parties
is considered to matter, despite being guaranteed not to sway the outcome,
while a vote for a third party is considered "wasted". And even curiouser,
choosing not to vote at all is considered the more rational option.

Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be
implemented state-by-state.

~~~
dllthomas
_" Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can
be implemented state-by-state."_

I prefer approval, but hey, your state can have IRV and mine can have approval
and thanks to the electoral college that doesn't break things!

Unless we're in the same state, in which case we'll have to agree on something
I guess.

~~~
lukifer
Unpack "approval" for me?

Honestly, I'm in favor of any modifications to winner-take-all. "None of the
Above" would be a major win for the protest vote, with a huge meta-electoral
effect even if it never wins. And while it would boost morale and turnout for
presidential years, the real effect would be seen if we elected Congress that
way as well.

~~~
dllthomas
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting)

Basically, you check yes or no for everyone, and the winner is the one with
the most "yes" votes. Less expressive than IRV, but also simpler to understand
and tabulate.

~~~
lukifer
Belatedly: thanks for sharing. It does seem an easier sell, because the
counting process is so easy to understand. It's not as favorable to third
parties as IRV, because "[X] Minor [X] Major" obviously doesn't carry as much
weight as "[1] Minor [2] Major", but at least it still kills the spoiler
effect. While IRV seems more "pure" in an information theory sense, Approval
is elegant in its simplicity.

~~~
dllthomas
That's mostly my views as well, yeah. There are a couple (narrow) weird cases
with IRV, too... but IRV is unquestionably a tremendous improvement over FPTP.

------
JunkDNA
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.

------
pron
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.

~~~
TWAndrews
Corporations can't put me in jail.

~~~
BudVVeezer
Not directly, but who do you think runs the jails and lobbies for stricter
laws to fill those jails?

~~~
vdaniuk
"Corporations" are not a single entity. Some are more aligned with the
development of society, some hinder it. It is harmful to lump all corporations
in one group.

------
pilif
_> 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.

------
rainsford
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
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
> 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.

------
prawn
Chomsky noted in a speech recently
([http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_noth...](http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_nothing_like_a_democracy/))
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
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
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.

------
deerpig
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_
>> _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.

------
lkrubner
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.

------
gokhan
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
> _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.

~~~
snowwrestler
What a joke. Please educate yourself about the history of successful social
movements like labor rights, civil rights, environmental protection, etc.

The privacy movement has not even begun to begin what is necessary to change
the law. For example: can you name the leading organization that works solely
on privacy? There isn't one. The issue is only sort-of covered if you add up
the partial work of a bunch of different orgs, like the EFF, ACLU, NRA,
Emily's List, etc.

So: want to move the needle? Start an organization, raise many millions of
dollars, collect thousands of contacts, and then run a big scary public and
grassroots campaign. Give money to privacy-friendly politicians, and spend
independent money to defeat opponents of privacy. Recruit privacy-friendly
folks to run for local, state, or federal office. Take meetings with
corporate, regulatory, and congressional staff to find folks who are
sympathetic to the cause. Run privacy conferences. Pay people to write privacy
blogs. Pick a nasty law and create a test case to get it into litigation. Etc,
etc.

Now you might say "we shouldn't have to do that." And you're right. But: life
isn't fair. Black people should not have had to risk lynchings in order to
vote, but they did--and they did it. And they fought it.

~~~
ataggart
>Please educate yourself about the history of successful social movements like
labor rights, civil rights, environmental protection, etc.

Given that the current context involves opposing government power, I'm not
sure labour rights and environmental protection are relevant examples; both
resulted in massive expansion of the effective scope government power.

Civil rights would perhaps be a slightly better example simply because what
was being fought against were largely government creations (e.g., legally
compulsory discrimination). And even then the civil rights movement had a
visible violent side[1].

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1ds5fa/a_march_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1ds5fa/a_march_on_washington_with_loaded_rifles/c9tg5ax)

~~~
pdonis
_Civil rights would perhaps be a slightly better example simply because what
was being fought against were largely government creations (e.g., legally
compulsory discrimination)._

And the "solution" was to exchange these for other government creations, like
the EEOC. Which on net resulted in a massive expansion of the effective scope
of government power (not least because many of the previous government
creations were at the state level, but what we have now is mostly federal).

------
driverdan
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
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
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.

------
MichaelGG
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
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
>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.

~~~
mpyne
> 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.

Or even if you talk in your house with your door wide open. Does anyone else
remember Star Trek VI?

But either way we also don't expect _every_ conversation we make outside to be
monitored as a matter of course. To the extent that NSA is doing this we are
right to be very upset.

The flipside is that even before email there were few options for
communications between third-parties that could not be intercepted _at all_
(without a full warrant) by the U.S. government within the U.S. Probably USPS
was it (though later telephones received that same protection). And there were
about zero methods if you were talking international communications (maybe
diplomatic pouch was safe, probably nothing else was). So in that regard
modern comms are still an improvement.

But I do agree with you that things people _need_ to have private, need to be
encrypted, as there are more threats out there than just the NSA.

------
arkitaip
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.

------
wyck
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.

------
sz4kerto
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
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.

~~~
cwoac
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).

------
brown9-2
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
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_m...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal#Role_of_the_media))
rather than the Washington Post in 2013 when the report on Presidential
Broccoli ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-
politics/wp/2013/07...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-
politics/wp/2013/07/09/president-obama-says-he-loves-broccoli/)).

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
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?

~~~
mortov
Sure, look at [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/20/groklaw-
sh...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/20/groklaw-shuts-nsa-
surveillance)

States explicitly "Groklaw relied in some cases on email tips from readers and
other anonymous sources".

Following the early days of the SCO reporting it was obvious there was
unreleased information being shared. There was even lots of discussion about
whether Groklaw was some secret group of IBM agents and stuff like that due to
the knowledge and insight being displayed at the time.

------
random42
A sad day indeed. The government has become "the terrorists".

~~~
yuvadam
The government has always been the terrorists.

------
r0h1n
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
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.

------
gwu78
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
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.

------
herrschindler
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
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.

------
rahoulb
> But for me, the Internet is over.

This is how I've been feeling about it for the last few weeks.

~~~
ttt_
The internet is imploding.

------
logn
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!

~~~
grey-area
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
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
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.

------
pgcsmd
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
On the plus side, so far as it goes, I don't think we could make a better case
for "chilling effects"...

------
astral303
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.

------
thezilch
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.

------
augustl
Would just like to mention mailpile:
[http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-
bac...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back)

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 :)

------
oneandoneis2
OMG.. Groklaw shut down!?

I'm in shock.

~~~
igravious
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?

~~~
grote
There is also [https://mykolab.com](https://mykolab.com) that PJ now uses:

If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term
safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a
service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is
under different laws than the US, laws which attempt to afford more privacy to
citizens. I have now gotten for myself an email there, p.jones at mykolab.com
in case anyone wishes to contact me over something really important and feels
squeamish about writing to an email address on a server in the US.

~~~
grey-area
NB

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243518)

------
rlpb
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?

~~~
kaoD
It's just non-feasible. Freenet is a distributed file/web database, not
realtime internet.

~~~
rlpb
Email does not have to be real time.

~~~
kaoD
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.

~~~
rlpb
> Email does not fit that medium.

Why not?

Email can be implemented in a global p2p file database. Every "email" simply
adds another file. Privacy can be ensured with encryption (as long as the
encryption is not broken, at least). See existing Freenet message boards for
an example.

It may not be Internet RFC821/822 (and subsequent standards) Email, but it is
email.

What part of this will not fit the Freenet model?

~~~
kaoD
How would you send the new file to your recipient?

~~~
rlpb
The same way that message boards do this already on Freenet.

See
[https://freenetproject.org/understand.html](https://freenetproject.org/understand.html).

Something like:

Publish a site using a USK (perhaps one per recipient), containing all
encrypted messages sent recently. Update the site with an additional message
when you need to send one. The recipient checks it for updates periodically.

I'm not sure if my understanding is inaccurate, but since Frost already
achieves something like this, I don't see that it's automatically impossible
such as what you seem to be inferring.

In fact, now that I look, there's:
[https://freenetproject.org/freemail.html](https://freenetproject.org/freemail.html)

I'm dubious about the safety of using non-Freenet clients, but surely this
demonstrates that it's possible to build a messaging system built over
Freenet?

~~~
kaoD
Yep, you're right.

------
_sh
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!

------
zmmmmm
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
From the way he presented it, I would be very surprised if there was anything
specific that cannot be told.

~~~
jacquesm
she

~~~
nkurz
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
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
> ... If you don't know use a gender neutral word ...

"it"?

~~~
a3n
"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.

------
mike-cardwell
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...

------
TheMagicHorsey
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.

------
001sky
_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

------
kabisote
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)

------
fmax30
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.

------
kineticfocus
relevant link...(Google+, Real Names, and Groklaw's Pamela Jones)(2011)
[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-real-names-
and-g...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-real-names-and-groklaws-
pamela-jones/1454)

------
runn1ng
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.

------
throw7
This is not surprising since "pj" guards his privacy and anonymity. Two things
the surveillance state doesn't want you to have.

~~~
dllthomas
pj is a woman:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Jones](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Jones)

------
yuhong
I hope if they really insist on doing this that they will be ready to cover
the Lavabit lawsuit when the secrecy is removed.

------
frank_boyd
It could be they were served a "National Security Letter".

Could this happen to a site like HN? And if so, would we know?

------
ricardobeat
What about using a secure electronic drop box like Wikileaks does? Crypto
still works.

------
jheriko
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.

------
etchalon
Such utter bullshit.

------
Questioneer
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
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.

~~~
einhverfr
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
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
> 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?

------
Questioneer
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)

------
bengrunfeld
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
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/)

------
JonFish85
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.

