What Snowden has wrought

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen writes about what he calls the ‘Snowden effect’ and lists all the things that has resulted from the revelations that Edward Snowden has made about the NSA.

It is highly telling that the highly secretive president Obama has been put on the defensive and forced to discuss these things as a result of the revelations and amusing to see him act as if he always wanted to discuss these issues, when in reality he has moved heaven and Earth to increase secrecy and prosecute whistleblowers. [Read more…]

The problem with email confidentiality

One consequence of the recent NSA revelations is that it has piqued my interest in the whole issue of encryption and internet confidentiality and security, topics about which I had at best a very hazy idea. For example, I had never even heard of Lavabit, the encrypted email service provider that apparently has attracted over 400,000 users in its ten years in operation. After word got out that Edward Snowden used it, the number of new monthly subscribers surged to three times its normal value. [Read more…]

NSA revelations may cost US companies between $22 and $35 billion

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation has released a report where they say that the recent NSA revelations are going to cost American companies that provide cloud computing and encryption services quite a lot of money, since many international businesses may be reluctant to give their business to US companies that can be compelled to provide the government with backdoor access to all their information. [Read more…]

Guilty bankers don’t even have to admit guilt

I have been railing about the fact that despite the massive damage that the major banks did to ordinary people and the economy leading up to and during the recent financial crisis, not a single major bank executive was even threatened with jail time. Instead the banks were merely fined amounts that seem impressive to ordinary people but are a pittance to the banks who can write it off as the cost of doing business. [Read more…]

And now Silent Mail shuts down and speaks out

Phil Zimmerman, who is the creator of the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption algorithm and the head of Silent Circle, the other encrypted global communication company that shut down along with Lavabit, has explained in an open letter why he took this action. He says that unlike the other services that his company provides for phone, video, and text services, where his company retains no data that it can be forced to provide to third parties and is thus secure from end-to-end, the nature of email is such that he could not provide that level of guarantee. [Read more…]

The strange story of Lavabit

Two email companies that used encrypted systems, one of which was used by Edward Snowden, have decided to shut down because they were clearly asked to do things by the government that compromised their clients’ confidentiality and they refused to do so.

The bizarre nature of the country we now live in demonstrated by the short letter that the head of one agency (Lavabit) released, of which I will highlight a small bit. [Read more…]

Australia’s Sarah Palin?

Stephanie Banister, a parliamentary candidate in next month’s Australian federal elections from the right wing nationalist One Nation party, is being described as their Sarah Palin. And it is not a compliment as this clip from a news report indicates. She thinks that Islam is a country and uses the Arabic word ‘haram’ (which roughly translates as sinful or forbidden or disapproved by god) as a umbrella term to cover anything Islamic. [Read more…]

The trickle of information continues

As one could have predicted, news is slowly emerging that the sweeping statements provided by the government about the limits of the information it was collecting are turning out to be false. They said that they only collect metadata and not the contents of the messages themselves. But a new report says that they do search through the data looking for certain keywords and if those are found, those emails are saved for later close analysis by humans. [Read more…]