From the Juan Cole article:

Where is our Amsterdam? Lavabits, Snowden & Wikileaks Censorship recall age of Absolutism | Informed Comment

The long struggle against censorship in the 18th century at the time of oppressive kings in Europe involved the hand-copying and circulation of unpublished anonymous manuscripts. Sometimes dangerous or proscribed books were printed in places beyond the reach of the French kings, in Amsterdam or Geneva.

These printers in Amsterdam and Geneva was by the proper printers with royal charter in Paris called buccaneers, pirates and bandits.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

It is commonly acknowledged that there is no encryption that the NSA can not crack. However, when faced with strong encryption, you have to know whether it's worth the effort or not. The NSA's datamining operation is based on trawling everything, everywhere, in order to see if it's interesting, and strong encryption defeats that.

So, the need for a backdoor. The theory is "OK you can have strong encryption, but the NSA gets to look at your content".

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

The really serious question is that of under which national jurisdiction could Lavabit operate in the interests of its subscribers? Is there any?

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

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I expect the American people will realize the present situation of expanded surveillance under the Patriot Act breaches the US Constitution. Obama may try to manage the damage, but with the flight of Snowden he has lost all control. How the White House has handled the issue will get more criticism, hurt Obama's popularity rating and challenges the Democrats in the midterm-election of 2014.

Obama's Reassurances about Domestic Surveillance are not Reassuring

(Informed Comment) - President Obama gave a news conference on Friday in which he addressed the controversy over Edward Snowden's revelations regarding NSA spying on the American people.

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Among the more shameful episodes in the Obama presidency has been his vindictiveness toward whistleblowers and his and Eric Holder's eagerness to use the fascistic 1917 Espionage Act against them. Seymour Hersh, who provoked the last big reforms of US intelligence, would have been charged with espionage by Barack Obama and would either have been executed or would have been given life in prison. In this regard, Obama's record is worse than Nixon's.

The 1917 Espionage Act was enacted just after the US went to war with Imperial Germany. It was twinned with a Sedition Act a year later, as this site explains: "Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a federal offense to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts."

In other words, the Espionage Act deployed against Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden is a manifestation of war fever and nationalist fascism from the early 20th century, and likely is unconstitutional, just as most of the Sedition Act has been ruled to be. It does not speak well of Mr. Obama that he is using this sort of tool to govern.

Mr. Obama at one point in his press conference called on Edward Snowden to come back to the United States and argue his case. I mean, really. This kind of disinformation and grandstanding can't possibly be necessary, even given the constraints mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Mr. Obama knows very well that if Snowden returned to the US, we would never ever hear from him ever again. He'd go straight to a maximum security prison for the rest of his days on earth and die there.

Bradley Manning was held at a brig by the Marines and was falsely declared a suicide risk so that he could be tortured by being chained naked to his bed for a year and woken up several times a night (sleep deprivation is a torture tactic, as is humiliation via making a prisoner nude. These same techniques were used by the US military on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib). There is no reason to believe that Snowden would be treated better. Note that Obama's own spokesman, P. J. Crowley, publicly criticized Manning's treatment and was fired for it. Obama had been in a position to stop the torture but did not.

[Links added are mine - Oui]

Under Obama, we have been subjected to a Patriot Act on steroids - 2012

See my diary @BooMan - Obama: Lesson In Statesmanship to Build a Relationship.

'Sapere aude'

Easier to penetrate a computer to read the plain text before encryption than messing around with decryption.  To start approaching secure email a person would need one computer to enter plain text and run the encryption that is never, ever, hooked directly to the internet and another linked to the internet for sending and receiving.  Load the incoming message on a disk and transfer to the 'air-firewalled' machine for reading.  Even then it is possible to adjoin spyware to incoming messages and when the user transfers the disk over to a reader the spyware defeats the encryption by attaching the plain text to the "encrypted" message.

So, somebody needs three machines:

1.  Dedicated Encryption Machine - never attached to the internet

2.  Sending and Receiving Machine

3.  Dedicated Decryption Machine - never attached to the internet

Surprisingly, perhaps, this system could be a single device retailing for around $150 (US.)    

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

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Thanks for all the heads up, much appreciated!

I came across this great video by EFF from June 2013 and wrote a diary @BooMan ...

Video NSA Debate: Obama '13 vs. Biden '06 - Guess Who Lost?

(EFF) - June 14, 2013 - After a leaked FISA court document revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is vacuuming up private data on millions of innocent Americans by collecting all the phone records of Verizon customers, President Obama responded by saying "let's have a debate" about the scope of US surveillance powers.

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Watch this video, as Senator Biden from 2006 directly refutes each point President Obama made about the NSA surveillance program at his news conference last week.

Original article at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - here - and the video link to YouTube.

'Sapere aude'

Of course there's no perfect way to keep your email private unless you have complete control over your own server. As noted by the EFF, this takes time and effort - and unless you're in dire need to keeping quiet, you might just have to trust somebody along the way.

    "MyKolab is hosted in Switzerland and benefits from the strong Swiss privacy laws. It is run exclusively with free software and using the service supports the development of Kolab. Also, it lets you export all your data at any time." - EFF

In addition to Kolab, the EFF lends their endorsement to Riseup and Autistici/Inventati. The first is a set of secure communications tools which requires an invitation, the second is a range of "privacy-aware" services for everything from email to webpage hosting services - that group also requires unique approval, which should be expected if you're aiming to have truly trustworthy service in the privacy-conscious realm (as sad as that is to say today.)

http://www.slashgear.com/lavabit-and-silent-circle-are-dead-encrypted-email-alternatives-still-activ e-09293394/

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

More revelations:

Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA:

Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting--the "hidden service" hosting provider on the Tor anonymized network brought down late last week--may have de-anonymized visitors to the sites running on that service. This issue could send identifying information about site visitors to an Internet Protocol address that was hard-coded into the script the malware injected into browsers. And it appears the IP address in question belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA).

This revelation comes from analysis done collaboratively by Baneki Privacy Labs, a collective of Internet security researchers, and VPN provider Cryptocloud. When the IP address was uncovered in the JavaScript exploit--which specifically targets Firefox Long-Term Support version 17, the version included in Tor Browser Bundle--a source at Baneki told Ars that he and others reached out to the malware and security community to help identify the source.

This stuff gets murky real fast.  Intelligence agencies have used private companies as fronts since, like, forever and they've also simply purchased good and services from private companies.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Schneier: when the NSA comes to your company's door, fight! - Boing Boing

Bruce Schneier has advice for America's tech companies: when the NSA comes to you and asks you to spy on your users, say NO. They'll promise you that no one will ever find out that you were helping them break the law, but they can't keep that promise. They'll put your company's name in PowerPoint presentations that they show to thousands of employees and contractors and suppliers, and the next whistleblower will out you for your cowardly complicity -- just like Snowden did for Microsoft, Apple, Google, and so many others. If you think not complying with the NSA will cost you the business, recognize that complying with them could also destroy you.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Apple patents tech that lets government disable iPhone video, camera and wi-fi - Boing Boing

Apple has a patent to disable "one or more functional or operational aspects of a wireless device, such as upon the occurrence of a certain event." For instance, the patent states, "Covert police or government operations may require complete 'blackout' conditions."

Larry Press has posted example photos of police or government operations that would have benefited from a such a kill switch. (Via IP)

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

NSA firing 90% of its sysadmins to eliminate potential Snowdens - Boing Boing

The NSA is going to cut 90% of its 1,000 sysadmins in a bid to reduce the risk of leaks. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a network administrator, charged with keeping the machines running on the network of vast data-centers used by the NSA to harvest, store and analyze unimaginably large quantities of data.

So, after this change, the NSA -- which now has nearly every compromising communication about every human alive -- will no longer have to worry about its sysadmins leaking its secrets. But it will have downsized its operational staff (and thus its capability to repel hackers and attackers) by 90 percent. I feel better already.

This is like a plutonium storehouse reducing the risk of guards selling fissiles on the black market by firing all of them and leaving a couple of dudes at the door with walkie-talkies.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

No, your data isn't secure in the cloud:

While online data storage services claim your data is encrypted, there are no guarantees. With recent revelations that the federal government taps into Internet search engines, email and cloud service providers, any myth about data "privacy" on the Internet has been busted.

Experts say there's simply no way to ever be completely sure your data will remain secure once you've moved it to the cloud.

When ComputerWorld talks corporate Decision Makers listen. Non-US companies are already pulling back from buying Cloud services from US companies.  One fall-out from NSA spying may very be a complete shut-out of US companies from the $111 to $131 billion/year (US) Cloud market.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Fascinating article about Glenn Greenwald's partner, doc filmmaker Laura Poitras, in the NY Times.

This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key -- allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key -- but she didn't think much would come of it.

The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. "Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second," the stranger wrote.

Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, "This I can prove."

(and how about this...)

"They took my bags and checked them," Poitras said. “They asked me what I was doing, and I said I was showing a movie in Sarajevo about the Iraq war. And then I sort of befriended the security guy. I asked what was going on. He said: `You're flagged. You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.' I said, `Is this a scoring system that works throughout all of Europe, or is this an American scoring system?' He said. `No, this is your government that has this and has told us to stop you.' "
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After being detained repeatedly, Poitras began taking steps to protect her data, asking a traveling companion to carry her laptop, leaving her notebooks overseas with friends or in safe deposit boxes. She would wipe her computers and cellphones clean so that there would be nothing for the authorities to see. Or she encrypted her data, so that law enforcement could not read any files they might get hold of. These security preparations could take a day or more before her travels.

It wasn't just border searches that she had to worry about. Poitras said she felt that if the government was suspicious enough to interrogate her at airports, it was also most likely surveilling her e-mail, phone calls and Web browsing. "I assume that there are National Security Letters on my e-mails," she told me, referring to one of the secretive surveillance tools used by the Department of Justice. A National Security Letter requires its recipients -- in most cases, Internet service providers and phone companies -- to provide customer data without notifying the customers or any other parties. Poitras suspected (but could not confirm, because her phone company and I.S.P. would be prohibited from telling her) that the F.B.I. had issued National Security Letters for her electronic communications.

this woman is obviously at the very center of such an civilization-changing story. Here filming the Utah NSA center...


"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

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Democracy Now Exclusive: Owner of Snowden's Email Service on Why He Closed Lavabit Rather Than Comply With Gov't

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald also wrote, "What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it."

Greenwald goes on to write, quote, "Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told [that] they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company."

LADAR LEVISON: Well, just to add one thing to Greenwald's comments, I mean, there's information that I can't even share with my lawyer, let alone with the American public. So if we're talking about secrecy, you know, it's really been taken to the extreme. And I think it's really being used by the current administration to cover up tactics that they may be ashamed of.

Glenn Greenwald: Email service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using US-based companies

Lavabit's Ladar Levison: 'If You Knew What I Know About Email, You Might Not Use It'

(Forbes) - Lavabit was created in 2004, in response to the Patriot Act, says Levison. He and friends from Southern Methodist University decided to create an email service by geeks for geeks. Levison was concerned that the FBI could send a company a national security letter (NSL) that would force them to turn over information about a customer without going through a court first. "I wanted to put myself in the position of not having information to turn over," he said. "I didn't want to be put in the position of compromising people's privacy without due process."

'Sapere aude'

NZ prime minister John Key: We have to spy on you because al-Qaeda has training camps here. Also: FISH! - Boing Boing

The New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is trying to ram through legislation to legalize the kind of domestic surveillance that the US NSA and the UK GCHQ have engaged in. When asked whether he thought he had popular support for allowing the government to spy on New Zealanders' entire online lives, he refused to answer the question and kept changing the subject to fishing quotas (seriously).

But there is pushback...


_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Oops, I'm not able to edit diary.
In first sentence one bad link, should be: encrypting email of US citizens [ZDNet link].

'Sapere aude'

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New revelations puts Obama, US Congress and the NSA intelligence community under more pressure. I love this snippet in the news ... President Obama will keep Congress informed of compliance issues as they arise.

Newest revelations of domestic spying by NSA stir up anger

White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said that the NSA documents showed that NSA's Compliance Office established in 2009 "is monitoring, detecting, addressing and reporting compliance incidents," and that "the majority of the compliance incidents are unintentional." In a statement from the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, where the president is vacationing, he added that the administration is "keeping the Congress appropriately informed of compliance issues as they arise."

'Sapere aude'