IDG News Service reports: Silent Circle also shuttered its encrypted email service a few hours after Lavabit shut down citing an ongoing legal battle.
“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” Silent Circle wrote in a blog post on Friday in reference to the closure by Lavabit.
The company, with U.S. headquarters in Maryland, said it had not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else from any government, and “this is why we are acting now.”
The closure of Lavabit and Silent Circle reflect concern among email providers about government orders for customer data under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Most of these come in the form of “gag orders” that prohibit the service providers from discussing in public the orders for disclosure of customer data. [Continue reading…]
Physicians communicate with their patients online via Secure Email. Is NSA going to go after that next??
There HAS to be another terminology worse than “police state” to describe what is happening to the USA!
ps administration’s actions are enough to make an “alleged person of interest” REALLY ill.
If the giant ISPs and email service providers were REALLY concerned about their customers’ privacy and 4th Amendment right, they would shut down their servers and services.
Small businesses have more guts than the giant corporations….. for them, ONLY the “bottom line” matters.
ps In May 2006, USA Today reported that millions of telephone calling records had been handed over to the United States National Security Agency by AT&T Corp., Verizon, and BellSouth since September 11, 2001. This data has been used to create a database of all international and domestic calls. Qwest was allegedly the lone holdout, despite threats from the NSA that their refusal to cooperate may jeopardize future government contracts, a decision which has earned them praise from those who oppose the NSA program ( from Wikipedia……which has claimed, “encryption” is a Human Right and will change its http to https )
O.K. hackers out there, time you earned your stripes and come up with that kernal for everyone to use, that infects/deletes the NSA and their info stealing. If it’s war they want, then war it shall be. Put the backdoor into their software, unless of course, you don’t know how to do it.