I wonder what percentage of companies have been used in some way to commit a crime. 90%?
I wonder what percentage of companies, when subpoenaed regarding crimes committed by a customer, refused to comply and decided to go out of business instead.
The issue here is clearly not compliance a legitimate subpoena, as evidenced by the fact that Lavabit has a track record of complying with these. The best inference available, given that mandated cover-up of what the government is attempting, is that Lavabit is rejecting an unlawful (as per the plain language of the Fourth Amendment, and the plain context of its drafting, namely that “general warrants” were one of the grievances that led to the American Revolution) attempt at blanket surveillance decoupled from any legitimate showing of individualized suspicion or the necessary statement of particular description of the communications to be accessed.
Please try to keep up with the class.
Lavabit does not have the authority to decide which subpoenas are lawful or unlawful. That’s for the courts to decide, and the fact that they’ve chosen not to fight this proves that they know it’s a lawful action and are simply grandstanding.
The recipient of an order is to simply follow it without making a determination of the order’s lawfulness? That’s not the generally accepted view; and insisting upon it has been known to have unfortunate consequences, up to and including hanging by the neck until dead.
In any case, the hypothetical existence of a subpoena, even an unlawful one, is an assertion of fact not in evidence.
And Godwin’d in 25.
Under US law, yes, Lavabit is to either acquiesce to the government’s requests, or convince a judge to put a stay on their motion until the matter can be adjudicated. There is nothing in the Constitution or law of the land that allows them to unilaterally declare the order illegal and refuse to follow it, nor any possible set of circumstances by which obeying instructions would lead to “hanging by the neck until dead”.
What are you babbling about? The order (whatever it is) has clearly been complied with via the shutdown; the government now has access to all zero point zero of their communications.
Maybe the Internet going Galt is what it will take to put the government back into its place.
- The government is in its place. It is the government’s job to protect the people from those like Edward Snowden and the terrorists he enables.
- Yes, let’s shut down the greatest technological achievement in human history because it’s possible that some mid-level bureaucrat might know you still think lolcats are funny. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The opposite. It is the job of many more people like Snowden to protect our hard-won liberties from the State by alerting us when they are secretly trampling over them. I’ve yet to see any evidence that Snowden has done anything to hurt anyone.
But I could name you a government responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths due to an illegal invasion of a country. And I could name you a country to this day that routinely kills civilians by the dozen in terroristic attacks in countries with which it is not at war.
No. They should post a very prominent protest on each page that is non-specific and warning about all contributions. The SDMB should do the same. We live in the United Stasi of America.
Justice be done, though the heavens fall.
That said, there are probably better alternatives that remove points of vulnerability. Not surprisingly, projects along those lines are springing up, e.g.:
With no one company controlling it, there’s no need to worry about it being shut down in response to an illegal fishing-expedition order. For that matter, there’s no need to worry about an illegal fishing-expedition order – there’s nobody in a position to be given such an order.
- Not a single one of your rights has been “trampled over” by the NSA’s programs.
- As stated above multiple times, he has made it easier for terrorists to plan their attacks in secret and harder for the federal government to stop them from killing Americans.
Russia? You know, the country your Real American Hero Edward Snowden apparently thinks is a better guarantor of human rights and civil liberties than the US?
Great Ghu, you’ve actually reached the point of suggesting that your assertions somehow become more credible because you’ve repeated them over and over… :rolleyes:
In the long run, the issue may become moot with the rise of a new generation of encrypted e-mail services, immune by design to this sort of interference:
The owner of Lavabit has posted an explanation at the Guardian:
I find it sickening the guy wasn’t allowed the traditional legal protections the American judicial process has allowed for hundreds of years.
Cory Doctorow makes an interesting point – the government may be able to tell you “you may not state this specific truth”, but the bar is much higher to a hypothetical requirement “you must tell this specific lie”. This suggests a “dead-man switch” workaround:
I bet the US postal service has helped people commit treason. We better shut that down.
So he ran a service that was helping people break the law, obstructed a government probe into the criminal activities of his clients, and shut down the company because he couldn’t in good conscience allow criminals to be brought to justice.
And he’s the victim here?
If the Postal Service were actively making it impossible for criminal communications or shipments of illegal goods in the mail to be tracked, and they actively refused an attempt by the government to find those shipments? Then yes.
But they do.
The USPS doesn’t know what’s in the parcels/letters, nor do they try to find out. And, if anyone asks to see them they will refuse, barring a court order. And, I would doubt very much that they would be willing to route all post through an NSA/FBI/CIA/Whatever facility for inspection and reading. If such an order were provided, I would consider it their moral responsibility to refuse to comply (and though I am no constitutional scholar, I think such an order would be illegal).
Now, if such orders are given openly and subject to debate, then the courts could weigh in BEFORE any damage was done, and at least theoretically justice would be served. Once we gag the very presence of such a request we render the entire constitution moot.
Really think for a minute about the actual effect of these gag orders. With that principle in place, the government can literally do anything it wants, since the very act of debating them is illegal. We could apply that logic to activities of the police. We could arrest people with secret warrants and try them in secret courts, then make it illegal to discuss these as well.
That anyone could support such unchecked power boggles my mind.