“I’ve always sort of believed it’s important for Americans to have private conversations with other Americans,” Mr. Levison said in a telephone interview Monday, “and not fear that their conversations were being monitored by the government.”
The problem with that is you know your service is going to be used by criminals, child pornography, organized crime, terrorists etc. So if you start this service you know you're going to have to comply with government requests for that data. It seems disingenuous to complain about their requests as though you didn't expect them and that they wouldn't e reasonable. And I think he's saying that in his own way when you get into the details: "Yep, I supported the narrowly defined ones but the broadly defined ones are the straw that broke the camels back"
> The problem with that is you know your service is going to be used by criminals, child pornography, organized crime, terrorists etc.
Thats a huge stretch and abuse of logic IMHO. Don't build roads because criminals and terrorists will drive on them. There will be also UPS/FedEx couriers delivering printed child pornography driving those roads. So better, setup checkpoint and unmanned vehicle x-ray type scanners and set them up every where on highways.
More insane: don't open a barber shop, because if you have hairy guy robbing bank next door, he can get a haircut at your place and cops will have hard time recognizing him.
I don't think every one and each of Lavabit 1,500 paid customers were terrorist. I understand and respect people willingness to have a safe and secure email, as Constitution says you should feel save and secure in your own skin.
> So if you start this service you know you're going to have to comply with government requests for that data.
We don't know what really happened. Knowing how feds work just a little bit, I wouldn't be suprised if owners were intimidated via FBI/CIA/DEA/IRS and plenty other Government Organisations. I wouldn't be suprised if owners, their families and their friends would fall under heavy scrutiny and deep IRS audits. There is really soo many things Feds can do not to break the law, technically, and still harass $hit out of you and your family.
If they fall on each gov request, next we will have that barber share his info, just because feds want to. You know, terrorists are humans; they do get haircut sometimes too.
> Thats a huge stretch and abuse of logic IMHO. Don't build roads because criminals and terrorists will drive on them.
Just thought those two sentences were funny being right next to each other.
Let's be honest here, though: The percentage of people using his email service for illegal reasons is much higher than the percentage of people using roads for the same illegal reasons. It's the same problem that Pastebin faces,[0] and it's the reason paste.pocoo.org shut down.[1] Services that advertise complete privacy and anonymity get swamped with people who want to hide illegal activity.
I think ceol covered this pretty well below (above?) I think the mistake you made was assuming I somehow meant all users would be of this type. My point was that if your position in the marketplace you're going to attract a higher % of these folks than a regular email service - not that the only user he ever would have would be this type.
The more I see arguments of this sort, the more I can see where we're heading. Not that there's anything wrong with your argument, this is the world live - we expect our state to have access to data on citizen when the said citizen is under investigation.
Too bad communications are only going to get more digitalized. I guess that soon we will live in a world where a citizen entire communication will be stored somewhere, ready to be mined on first suspicions.
One day, the thin line that makes a citizen a suspect will be blurry enough that we'll wonder how did we get the state this level of access in our lives in the first place. It'll probably be too late then.
So what? That's like saying Comcast, AT&T, and other service providers should feel guilty for what their users do with their networks? Please. As if they would.
So you don't see a serious difference between narrowly-defined and broadly-defined snooping?
How about the different between narrowly-defined detention and wholesale just-in-case detention of everyone?
The two are directly analogous, in that scope makes all the difference in both cases. It's entirely possible to support detention of reasonably suspected criminals, and at the same time oppose formation of mass concentration camps. Nothing disingenuous about that.
If the terrorist, kiddie porn arguments have primacy, free society is well and truly over. We can apply those criteria to everything, and, well, shut down.
If you think this mass surveillance was set up to fight child porn or terrorists, you're extremely naive.
It's a power grab. Pure and simple. Those who control this system can easily find dirt on their political/corporate opponents, while being completely immune.
They might stop some occasional clueless idiot terrorists or CP distributors, but that's not the end goal, that's just the political theater.
You really think terrorists don't properly encrypt their conversations?
You really think high-level criminals don't properly encrypt their conversations?
To be fair, I think most would-be terrorists are not terribly sophisticated. If they were very sophisticated we'd be seeing a lot more successful attacks against targets abroad. The current terrorist threat is overhyped to a large degree in my unprofessional opinion. I mean, the head of Al Qaeda was holed up in a small compound watching porn, he didn't even have any sort of backup plan for when SpecOps eventually came to his doorstep.
High-level criminals otoh are most certainly savvy enough to not communicate important information through unencrypted channels.
> Hi Guys, We got a big position in 3m libor for the next 3 days. Can we please keep the libor fixing at 5.39 for the next few days. It would really help.
(I actually think there are high-level criminals among terrorists, mafiosi, Wall St., and even computer programmers. But of course the existence of such high-level criminals isn't an excuse for a government to abandon the rule of law and violate its constitution...)
The problem with that is you know your service is going to be used by criminals, child pornography, organized crime, terrorists etc. So if you start this service you know you're going to have to comply with government requests for that data. It seems disingenuous to complain about their requests as though you didn't expect them and that they wouldn't e reasonable. And I think he's saying that in his own way when you get into the details: "Yep, I supported the narrowly defined ones but the broadly defined ones are the straw that broke the camels back"