Big Brother shuts down encrypted Internet service

NSA agents going to work last Wednesday.

Big Brother shuts down two
encrypted Internet services

Dear Leader Obama attacks two private

companies . . . the GOP is silent.

The Growing Police State  -  Democrats and Republicans have joined arm-in-arm to goosestep into the 21st Century.

The Republic is Dead.  Long Live Big Brother.

Infowars News and RT News reports that Texas-based Lavabit posted a cryptic message as their homepage and has shutdown service.

This is the provider that Edward Snowden supposedly used, so it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that some unholy alliance of the NSA, FBI, CIA, and some other alphabet-soup star-chamber despots served them papers including a gag-order.

Here is the message in full (emphasis mine):

My Fellow Users, 

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.  

After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this.  

Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely, Ladar Levison Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

http://lavabit.com/


Encrypting your life? 
Encrypting your data may keep you off the grid.  But Big Brother is shutting down those private companies.

NSA scandal fallout

Silent Circle, a secure email service that provides customers with an encrypted way of sending messages, announced Thursday that it is shutting down only hours after a company offering a similar product said the same.

Shortly after the owner and operator of Lavabit.com wrote that his nine-year-old encrypted email service was shutting down in order to avoid becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people,” Silent Circle said Thursday they’d be following suit.

“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” founder Jon Callas wrote in a blog post reports RT News.

Callas helped start Silent Circle in 2011 along with Phil Zimmermann, the creator of the widely-used email encryption program Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.

“We’ve created an architecture that doesn’t share cryptographic keys with the servers that we control. So if the government tries to persuade us to hand over something that we might have on our servers, we can’t give them the keys and we can’t give them the decrypted messages. We don’t keep logs of the connections between people. So a court order can’t make us give them something we don’t have,” Zimmerman told RT earlier this year.

In a blog post Thursday afternoon, attorney Jennifer Granick of the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, wrote, “America invented the Internet, and our Internet companies are dominant around the world. But the US government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive industry.”

Silent Circle’s Zimmerman previously told RT that his company saw “a huge surge in orders” following the NSA surveillance documents disclosed in June by Edward Snowden. Lavabit said it was processing around 200,000 emails a day before shutting down abruptly on Thursday.


See (Infowars News)