Personal email and private clouds fall in war on privacy

Here’s how bad it’s become: Yesterday, two “secure” email service providers decided they’d rather close up shop than cooperate with the United Spooks of America.

First, Lavabits founder Ladar Levison posted a notice to his 350,000 customers saying he was shutting down the service, effectively immediately. His letter has since shot around the Internet thousands of times, but the salient bits are worth repeating.

In his farewell missive, Levison asserts:

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.

Here’s a clue. If you ask someone whether our Constitutional rights are being flushed down the porcelain oubliette, and their response is, “If I answer that honestly they’ll arrest me,” then you already have your answer.

Silent Circle goes silent

Shortly after Levison posted his corporate suicide note, another service called Silent Circle decided to pack it in, too, and shut down its Silent Mail product. Its reasoning:

Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure…. We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.

The company is, however, keeping Silent Phone and Silent Text alive, because their end-to-end encryption cannot be so easily compromised.

The fact that this all happened on the 39th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation seems appropriate somehow. It was the excesses of the Nixon administration that brought about the “reforms” in our intelligence services. The Pentagon Papers and Watergate inspired Congress to look into J. Edgar Hoover’s illegal wiretaps, the CIA’s secret assassination plots, and the FBI’s infiltration of student protest groups. It ultimately led to the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was supposed to allow our nation’s spooks to spy on threats to the United States without trampling the rights of the rest of us.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The spy who logged me

The revelations of misdeeds by the Industrial surveillance complex keep coming, and there appears to be no end in sight. Over the last week we’ve learned the following:

• All kinds of government agencies are clamoring to get their hands on that juicy data the NSA claims it’s not really collecting about all of us, for reasons that have not one thing to do with terrorism. According to the New York Times, the NSA fends off most of these requests because they are “lower priority.” In other words, it’s the NSA’s data and it wants to keep it, but apparently not in every case (see my next point).

• The DEA uses data from NSA intercepts in drug cases, then goes back and “re-creates” the investigation to cover up the use of that data. From there, the DEA uses it to coerce plea bargains out of suspects. When the suspects decide to challenge the evidence instead, the DEA usually drops the case. Not only did senior DEA officials tell Reuters they’re doing this, they admit they’ve been doing something like this for decades — calling it a “bedrock concept” of drug enforcement.

This is your war on drugs. And it’s only cost about $1 trillion so far. At least we got “Breaking Bad” out of it.

• The NSA routinely searches the content of emails coming in and out of the country for keywords — not just the emails of non-U.S. citizens, and not just the conversations of people who are on the NSA’s 875,000-member terrorist watchlist. If your email is merely “about” something the NSA is interested in, it goes into the hopper for further analysis.

Doesn’t that directly contradict what spy agency officials have been telling Congress and the rest of us? Yes, it does. Hope you’re not asking your foreign friends for recommendations on what pressure cooker to buy or talking about how Daft Punk is “da bomb.”

Oh yeah: Glenn Greenwald promises there are plenty more leaks still to come. Fasten your seatbelts.

International men of misery

Most of the debate in the United States has been whether the NSA is targeting Americans when it’s not supposed to. (The answer to that also seems to be yes.) Because it’s a given the NSA is targeting everyone else on the planet who has access to electricity.

Guess what? The rest of the planet is not pleased. The damage to U.S. Internet companies that do business internationally — which is to say, nearly all of them — may be catastrophic.

A report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation says that NSA spying could cost U.S. cloud companies between $22 billion and $35 billion, as international customers take their business elsewhere. Given the privacy regulations in the EU and parts of Asia, they may not have any choice.

Let’s say you approach a cloud storage company and ask if your data is truly secure or whether it’s going be funneled into a massive database and used to prosecute meth dealers in New Mexico. But instead of answering, the company shrugs its shoulders and makes the zipper motion across the mouth. Would you do business with that firm?

That’s the situation facing companies Lavabits and Silent Mail — not to mention Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, and so on. If no one is allowed to say what’s really going on, no data is safe, and everyone becomes suspect.

I thought the NSA’s job was to keep people from hurting this country. I must have had that backward.