Lavabit was the encrypted email service that Edward Snowden used. Thanks to a court order that revealed hitherto secret hearings, we now know what prompted Ladar Levison, the founder of the company, to close the service.

The US government ordered the company to hand over the encryption keys to not only Snowden’s account but to every one of the 400,000 people who used the service. Basically, the government wanted Lavabit to defeat its own system, by allowing the FBI to install a “pen register trap and trace device” that could monitor all the email metadata. Levison had previously complied with targeted court orders to hand over data about specific individuals but balked at giving blanket access to everyone’s accounts. [Read more…]

Charlie Pierce does the honors:

Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one. [Read more…]

So the United States government has shut down much of its operations due to the decision by the Republican party that this is the only way they can repeal the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. For those who wonder how rare this kind of action is, Cannie Cass provides an entertaining history of previous fiscal crisis points. [Read more…]

As the deadlocked US government moves inexorably towards a shut down, it may be good to see how it has come to this. Last Friday, I attended a discussion led by one of my colleagues in the political science department. I have always found him to be very enlightening because he takes a hard-edged, data-driven approach to politics and he did not disappoint this time either. He shed many interesting insights into what lies behind the current situation. [Read more…]

The real danger of propaganda is when the people who spout it start believing in it themselves. This is particularly prone to happen in a successful propaganda system as exists in the US where the filters work so effectively that we end up with government and the media living in an echo chamber where the same myths and lies are repeated endlessly. It then becomes only a matter of time before people take as fact things that are flat out untrue. [Read more…]