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'No
shield from forced exposure': Groklaw website shuts down over NSA
spying
Groklaw,
a legal news site that has won numerous awards for its courtroom
coverage of tech issues during the last decade, is shutting down in
the wake of revelations about the lack of online privacy.
RT,
20
August, 2013
In
a farewell
post published
on Groklaw.net early Tuesday, paralegal and founder Pamela Jones
wrote that she will no longer update her site following the recent
high-profile disclosures about digital surveillance programs operated
by the United States government and other nations abroad.
“[T]he
conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing
Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it's good to be
realistic,” she
wrote.
Jones
said Tuesday that the recent shuttering of encrypted email
provider Lavabit over
surveillance woes put her over the edge with regards to whether or
not she should continue publishing her site in the wake of leaked
National Security Agency documents detailing vast-reaching spy
programs that collect the emails entering and exiting the US.
“The
owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we
knew what he knew, we'd stop too,”
Jones wrote. “There
is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.”
“And
the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for
collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no
matter how ‘clean’ we all are ourselves from the standpoint of
the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I
don't know how to do Groklaw like this,”
she added.
Forced Exposure ~pj --- This is the last Groklaw article. Thank you for all you've done. I will never forget you and our work together.
"There
is now no shield from forced exposure," she wrote.
Citing
leaked NSA documents describing how any email intended or sent from a
non-US person can be retained for years — as well as any
correspondence encrypted for security — Jones wrote that she no
longer feels comfortable running a site where she suspects her
communications with an international audience can legally be
intercepted by the US government.
“I'm
just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and
some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online
personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring
privacy online is impossible,”
she said.
“[F]or
me, the Internet is over.”
Jones’
decision comes less than two weeks after Lavabit owner Ladar Levison
announced he’d be shutting down his email service after more than
nine years. “I
have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in
crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years
of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,”
he wrote on his website. In an interview with
RT, Levison made further comments suggesting that he was asked by
investigators to provide the government with access to private emails
or risk prosecution.
“Our
government can order us to do things that are morally and ethically
wrong, order us to spy on other Americans and then order us — using
the threat of imprisonment — to keep it all secret,”
he told RT.
Hours
after Lavabit closed down abruptly, competitor Silent Circle said
they’d be taking their secure email service offline as
well after seeing “the
writing on the wall.”
Now only days down the road, another site has pulled the plug not
over fears it will be asked to compromise the privacy of its
customers, but because that sense of security is largely already
absent.
“Another
site,”
tweeted Cato Institute fellow Julian Sanchez, “decides
it's not worth being online if there's no real privacy.”
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