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.
Last night Thom Hartmann interviewed Ron Paul in his Conversations with Great Minds segment. Paul's take on all of this is that what's happening is already illegal according to the constitution, but that we aren't able to enforce the law because corporations, special interests and political lapdogs write their own laws. I'm still not sure what my stance on Paul is but I like his core political belief of nonintervention. It's similar to the golden rule but for politics, so for example if you spy on americans, you infringe their property right, in this case by stealing their privacy. An individual should be able to sue the NSA for that and win, setting a precedent for the rest of the population. The fact that they can't shows just how corrupt the system truly is. I'm not a libertarian but he made me stop and think:
> 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.
Can you comment on the difference between the 1st and 4th Amendment? It seems the current issues we face are reducible to the broadest interpretations of "reasonable" searches under National Defense claims from the Executive branch. It's hard for me to see how the Public has much recourse here. Even if they were to convince their representatives to pass new laws, this still seems like a fight between the other two branches. The Executive branch could ignore those laws under Executive privilege claims. And the Court seems more than willing to abide by that use of Executive power.
Am I missing something? Short of a generational movement to move the Court on civil rights toward information privacy (akin perhaps to medical privacy claims), I really don't see an alternative. The Executive branch has every incentive to maintain their power here (and argue as such under the War Powers). And the Court seems all too willing to cede that authority.
I have been thinking that appointing Congress/Parliament by random selection from the population would be a good idea. Who do you think would be more likely to want to want power, for example?
I agree with everything here and in the original post. What isn't clearly explained is how/why the government's behavior is prohibiting the continuation of Groklaw.
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.
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.
PJ could help people understand the real issues if she explained that all plaintext mail is vulnerable. It's not only about the mail host, it's the network itself that's compromised.
Switching to Kolab is false comfort for people who are "squeamish" about sending mail to "a server in the US".
I'd love to see PJ publish her public key and encourage people to learn how to use it.
Thank you, PJ, for the invaluable and remarkable work you have done for the FOSS community and, as a consequence, wider society in general over the years. On a personal note, thank you also for helping me with some research for a paper I was writing a couple of years back even though you were a busy person.
I really hope that people look not only into the current list of abuses, but also into the whole nature of government that _inevitably_ led to this point.
Band-aids and spin doctors are not going to make these problems go away. At best they'll just make the problems go further underground so that we don't hear about them as often in the news.
Do you think the NSA is looking to cut back its authority or is it looking to prevent public awareness of this kind of thing in the future?
Since like a beginning of the Future History kind of rule. Then good thing is, it will last for only a couple of the decades before people wake up and restore the freedom. At least it was like that in the book.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You know what's my thought towards such employers? A big fat FUCK YOU! Those are companies, where I rather collect unemployment benefits than ever working one day for such an outfit.
The same sentiment is extended to any service, which requires me to have a Facebook (or any other social media) account.
I'm not saying things are good in America right now, but I think our problems are due to my fellow citizens, not some evil cabal of overlords. If we're all gonna steer the plane into the ground, well, I wish we wouldn't, but from everything I see we are doing this to ourselves. We went crazy over terrorism, and we didn't come back.
> once you debase intelligent debate/freedom of expression and [...] you debase the minds of the people as a whole and open the door to committing worse atrocities.
...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."
Encryption is mentioned in the article, but dismissed as encrypted e-mails are stored for 5 years in hope of new discoveries for decrypting without the private key.
I still agree with you, though.. PGP is pretty good, after all :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> If the US could shut down The Guardian they would.
That's stupid. Of course they wouldn't. They would require them to stop reporting on the security state. But that is vastly different from shuttering them all together.
The Guardian certainly performs a public service in a variety of other domains (from which the government can and does benefit). The security state just doesn't want the press banging around in their domain.
Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Chomsky noted in a speech recently (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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] grellas|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zackmorris|12 years ago|reply
http://www.thomhartmann.com/bigpicture/full-show-81913-ron-p...
[+] [-] brianpgordon|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robg|12 years ago|reply
Am I missing something? Short of a generational movement to move the Court on civil rights toward information privacy (akin perhaps to medical privacy claims), I really don't see an alternative. The Executive branch has every incentive to maintain their power here (and argue as such under the War Powers). And the Court seems all too willing to cede that authority.
[+] [-] MayankGoyal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yuhong|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subdane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] panarky|12 years ago|reply
Switching to Kolab is false comfort for people who are "squeamish" about sending mail to "a server in the US".
I'd love to see PJ publish her public key and encourage people to learn how to use it.
[+] [-] igravious|12 years ago|reply
Thank you, PJ, for the invaluable and remarkable work you have done for the FOSS community and, as a consequence, wider society in general over the years. On a personal note, thank you also for helping me with some research for a paper I was writing a couple of years back even though you were a busy person.
[+] [-] ak0s|12 years ago|reply
As for whistleblowers — it's all about politics and “your enemy is my friend” between States and Russan rustlers.
[+] [-] crusso|12 years ago|reply
Bruce Willis said it best. :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD94dVu8lqQ
I really hope that people look not only into the current list of abuses, but also into the whole nature of government that _inevitably_ led to this point.
Band-aids and spin doctors are not going to make these problems go away. At best they'll just make the problems go further underground so that we don't hear about them as often in the news.
Do you think the NSA is looking to cut back its authority or is it looking to prevent public awareness of this kind of thing in the future?
[+] [-] levosmetalo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgg|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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
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.
[+] [-] bostik|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CaptainZapp|12 years ago|reply
The same sentiment is extended to any service, which requires me to have a Facebook (or any other social media) account.
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_spothawk|12 years ago|reply
see: the cultural revolution
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cookiecaper|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] augustl|12 years ago|reply
I still agree with you, though.. PGP is pretty good, after all :)
[+] [-] nemik|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FedRegister|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixie_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmax|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.
[+] [-] rolux|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] knowtheory|12 years ago|reply
That's stupid. Of course they wouldn't. They would require them to stop reporting on the security state. But that is vastly different from shuttering them all together.
The Guardian certainly performs a public service in a variety of other domains (from which the government can and does benefit). The security state just doesn't want the press banging around in their domain.
Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JunkDNA|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pron|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pilif|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deerpig|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lkrubner|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arkitaip|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyck|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] brown9-2|12 years ago|reply
I was under the (probably wrong) impression that most of what Groklaw did was explain the law and court cases in simple terms.
[+] [-] random42|12 years ago|reply