Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Groklaw shutting down because of our new US survelliance state

(1/3) > >>

40hz:
This is probably the most disturbing bit of news to date. Groklaw, long-time champion of online freedoms and laws which respect liberty and The Constitution is saying it can't continue under the present state of affairs. Pamela Jones issued this statement today.

It's been covered by several prominent websites such as Popehat

Faced With The Security State, Groklaw Opts Out
Aug 20, 2013
By Ken White.
Politics & Current Events   

For ten years Pamela Jones has run Groklaw, a site collecting, discussing, and explaining legal developments of interest to the open-source software community. Her efforts have, justifiably, won many awards.

She's done now.

Running a blog long-term can be exhausting, irritating, and sometimes discouraging. Creative efforts have arcs, with a beginning and an end. If Jones were closing up shop because she's had enough and has accomplished what she set out to do, I would be sorry to see her go, but it would be the kind of sorry you feel when you finish a good book.

That's not why she's stopping.

Pamela Jones is ending Groklaw because she can't trust her government. She's ending it because, in the post-9/11 era, there's no viable and reliable way to assure that our email won't be read by the state — because she can't confidently communicate privately with her readers and tipsters and subjects and friends and family.

    "I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel.

    So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate."

In making this choice, Jones echoes the words of Lavar Levison, who shut down his encrypted email service Lavabit. Levison said he was doing so rather than "become complicit in crimes against the American people"

<more>
--- End quote ---

and Techdirt.

More NSA Spying Fallout: Groklaw Shutting Down
from the the-pain-of-being-watched dept


A few months ago, after the NSA spying stories first broke, we wrote about a bit from This American Life where the host, Ira Glass, was interviewing lawyers for prisoners detained at Guantanamo, about the impact of knowing that the government was listening in on every single phone call you made. The responses were chilling. The people talked about how it stopped them from being emotional with their children or other close friends and relatives. How they had trouble functioning in ways that many people take for granted, just because the mental stress of knowing that you have absolutely no privacy is incredibly burdensome. PJ, the dynamo behind Groklaw, has written a powerful piece explaining the similar feeling she's getting from all the revelations about government surveillance, in particularly the shutting down of Lavabit by Ladar Levison, and his suggestion that if people knew what he knew about email, they wouldn't use it.

Because of this, she's shutting down Groklaw.

You really need to read the entire piece, but it clearly lays out the sort of mental anguish that you get with the realization that what you thought was private and personal, might not be any more. She compares it to the feeling of having her apartment robbed, and the creepy feeling you get that some stranger was riffing through all of your personal belongings. And, from there, she riffs on the importance of privacy and intimacy, and how the totalitarian state takes those things away, quoting a powerful passage from Janna Malamud Smith's book Private Matters. You should go read the full quotes, but it notes the psychological impact of not having privacy.

And that's how PJ feels right now. The fact that the NSA is collecting all emails in or out of the US, as well as all encrypted messages, means that it's impossible to have that privacy and intimacy that she feels is necessary to run the site:

    "There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel.

    So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.

    I'm really sorry that it's so. I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint."

<more>
--- End quote ---




This is indeed a day of national mourning. :(

xtabber:
Not to worry!

We have it on the authority of Katarina Witt that there is a big difference between East German Stasi and United States' NSA program.

Of course, she also goes on to say that "people are naïve if they don't think storage of their email, telephone and other electronic records doesn't make them vulnerable."

In their wildest dreams, the Stasi couldn't have imagined the technological capabilities of the NSA, but alas, our elected leaders don't seem to have learned anything at all from the example of East Germany (or North Korea, for that matter).

Renegade:
This is probably the most disturbing bit of news to date.

...

This is indeed a day of national mourning. :(-40hz (August 20, 2013, 11:58 AM)
--- End quote ---

The world just became a lot shittier. :'(

This is a catastrophe. The cracks are showing - Lavabit - Silent Circle - Groklaw - and god knows how many people have just kept their mouths shut anyways.

I am thankful that Glen Grenwald has doubled his resolve to speak out. We need that. Speech sometimes is not just a right, but also a duty.

In light of how the psychopaths in power have spoken out against tolerating freedom of speech ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=feinstein+bloggers+first+amendment ), it's understandable why some people wouldn't want to go to prison.

I certainly can't blame anyone for that.

However, I can certainly applaud people like Glen Grenwald and Chief Mark Kessler for saying things that aren't popular with some and having the courage to stand up for what in a few years may well become "forgotten rights".

Edvard:
This is doubly sad, because in a way, it's exactly what a totalitarian government would want.  You want free speech?  Fine, as long as we can listen in.  Oh, you're not talking then?  Good, we won't have to make the effort to tell you to shut up.

Bad bad bad bad bad...

TaoPhoenix:

Right, and part of the pain of it all is it "doesn't accomplish anything" - it's a "removal action", which makes us all sad, but doesn't have an earthquaking effect that would be necessary to have a hope of change. So it's like a sick game show "which service will be next", and one by one we'll be sad, and minus a bunch of stuff, and ... then?

Were it not that they were helping, it would be like "Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook all decided that they would cease operations until the spying stopped".

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page