Category Archives: NSA

Oliver Stone’s movie about Edward Snowden

The New York Times reports: Oliver Stone, one of Hollywood’s most provocative directors, will make a movie about one of the world’s most divisive figures: Edward Snowden.

Mr. Stone, who has been vocal in his support for Mr. Snowden, calling the former National Security Agency contractor a “hero,” for instance, on Monday confirmed plans to adapt “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man” for the screen. That book was written by Luke Harding, a journalist for The Guardian newspaper; Mr. Harding will serve as a production consultant.

“This is one of the greatest stories of our time,” Mr. Stone said in a statement. “A real challenge. I’m glad to have The Guardian working with us.” No studio partner or financing plan was announced.

Mr. Stone, who has been circling Mr. Snowden since early spring, when he visited him in Moscow, will have to race a rival project: Last month, Sony Pictures Entertainment bought the film rights to Glenn Greenwald’s “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. and the U.S. Surveillance State.” Sony’s film is being produced by the team behind the James Bond franchise.

The dueling adaptations come after lukewarm interest from Hollywood. Studios in particular got spooked by “The Fifth Estate,” a DreamWorks Studios movie about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that bombed at the box office in October, costing $28 million to make and taking in just $8.6 million worldwide.

Given Stone’s longstanding interest in Snowden, I would assume that he made an offer to buy the film rights to Greenwald’s book. If that’s the case, did Greenwald feel like the James Bond franchise producers would make a better movie, or did it simply come down to the question of who was willing to pay the most? Studios obviously have deeper pockets than directors.

Facebooktwittermail

Edward Snowden ‘probably’ not a Russian spy, new NSA chief says

NBC News reports: The new head of the National Security Agency said Tuesday he doesn’t believe former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is or was a Russian spy.

Adm. Michael Rogers, who became head of the U.S.’s spy infrastructure in April, said at a cybersecurity event organized by Bloomberg Government that while he believed it was “wrong” and “illegal” for Snowden to have leaked thousands of classified documents, he appeared to be doing what he sincerely thought was right.

Asked whether he thought Snowden was or is working for the FSB, the Russian security service, Rogers said: “Could he have? Possibly. Do I believe that that’s the case? Probably not.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

As the NSA hoards millions of face images, Facebook masters facial recognition

The New York Times reports: The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
[…]
The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.

The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.

She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.” [Continue reading…]

Facebook might not have created what would narrowly be defined as face recognition databases, yet true to its name it has amassed what must be the largest repository of personal images in existence. Despite hyperbolic claims about the NSA’s interest in watching everyone, Facebook’s global ambitions really can’t be overstated.

The latest revelation about the NSA is in many ways, more of the same — an account of its appetite for data hoarding. However it manages to exploit the massive volume of data it accumulates, it will most likely be again piggybacking on advances crafted in Silicon Valley, the real home of Big Brother.

As Sebastian Anthony recently reported: Facebook’s facial recognition research project, DeepFace (yes really), is now very nearly as accurate as the human brain. DeepFace can look at two photos, and irrespective of lighting or angle, can say with 97.25% accuracy whether the photos contain the same face. Humans can perform the same task with 97.53% accuracy. DeepFace is currently just a research project, but in the future it will likely be used to help with facial recognition on the Facebook website. It would also be irresponsible if we didn’t mention the true power of facial recognition, which Facebook is surely investigating: Tracking your face across the entirety of the web, and in real life, as you move from shop to shop, producing some very lucrative behavioral tracking data indeed.

Facebooktwittermail

The House committee on intelligence needs oversight of its own

Rep. Rush Holt and Steven Aftergood write: Who watches the watchmen?

In the U.S. House of Representatives, the answer to that question – in theory, at least – is the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), which is charged with overseeing the nation’s spy agencies: the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and more.

HPSCI was created in 1977 in the wake of Nixon-era surveillance abuses to serve as a powerful counterbalance to the spy agencies’ inclination to spy on everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Because of the sensitive nature of HPSCI’s work, the committee usually meets in secret, deliberates in secret, and even passes legislation in secret. But all this secrecy creates a problem: How do we know that HPSCI is, in fact, watching the watchmen effectively?

Last year, all the world learned it wasn’t. As the explosive revelations from Edward Snowden and others demonstrated, the intelligence community had been collecting the communications of essentially every American.

Now, for the first time since Snowden’s disclosures, HPSCI has brought its annual intelligence authorization bill to the House floor, where it quickly passed by a vote of 345-59 on Friday morning. This should have represented an opportunity for a dramatic overhaul of the intelligence community and for some critical examination of HPSCI’s own role. But it appears that HPSCI has lost sight of its founding principles – that it is, in effect, choosing allegiance to our nation’s spies, rather than to the law-abiding citizens who are being spied upon. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Tom Engelhardt: The Big Brotherness of it all

Surveilling the Class of 2014
By Tom Engelhardt

Internet Class of 2014, I’m in awe of you! To this giant, darkened auditorium filled with sparkling screens of every sort, welcome! 

It would, of course, be inaccurate to say, as speakers like me once did, that after four years of effort and experience you are now about to leave the hallowed halls of this campus and graduate into a new and adult world.  The odds are that you aren’t.  You were graduated into that world long ago.  I’m not sure that it qualifies as adult at all, but a new world it surely is, and one I grasp so little that I feel I should be in the audience and you up here doing what graduation speakers normally do: offering an upbeat, even inspirational, explanation of our world and your place in it.

Honestly, I’m like one of those old codgers I used to watch in the military parades of my 1950s childhood.  You know, white-haired guys in open vehicles, probably veterans of the Spanish-American War (a conflict you’ve undoubtedly never heard of amid the ongoing wars of your own lifetime).  To me, they always looked like they had been disinterred from some museum of ancient history, some unimaginable American Pompeii.

And yet those men and I probably had more in common than you and I do now.  After all, I don’t have a smartphone or an iPad.  I’m a book editor, but lack a Kindle or a Nook.  I don’t tweet or Skype.  I can’t photograph anyone or shoot video of anything.  I don’t know how to text or read my email while walking in the street or sitting in a restaurant.  And when something goes wrong on my computer or with the Internet, I collapse in a heap, believe myself a doomed man on an alien planet, mourn the passing of the typewriter, and call my daughter and throw myself on her mercy.

You were “graduated” long ago into the world that, though I live in it after a fashion as the guy who runs TomDispatch.com, I still find as alien as a Martian landscape.  Your very fingers, agile as they are with little buttons of every sort, speak a new and different language, and a lot of the time it seems to me that I have no translator on hand.  Your world, the sea you swim in, has been hailed for its many wonders and miracles — and wonders and miracles they surely are. Dazzling they truly can be.  The tying together of the planet in instantaneous communion as if space and geography, distances of every sort, were a thing of the past still stuns me.

Sometimes, as in my first experience with Skype, I feel like a Trobriand Islander suddenly plunged into the wonders of modernity.  If you had told me back in the 1950s that someday I would actually see whomever I was talking to onscreen, I doubt I would have believed you.  (On the other hand, I was partial to the fantasy that we would all be experiencing traffic jams in the skies over our cities as we zipped around with our own personal jetpacks strapped to our backs — a promised future no one ever delivered.)

There’s a book to be written on just how disorienting it is to live into the world of the future, as at almost 70 years old I now find myself doing.  There is, however, one part of our futuristic world that I feel strangely at home with.  Its accomplishments are no less technologically awe-inspiring, no less staggeringly sci-fi-ish than the ones I’ve been talking about and yet, perhaps in part thanks to a youth heavily influenced by George Orwell’s 1984 and other dystopian writings, it seems oddly familiar to me, as if I had parachuted from a circling spacecraft onto an only slightly updated version of my own planet.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Snowden would not get a fair trial — and Kerry is wrong

Daniel Ellsberg writes: John Kerry was in my mind Wednesday morning, and not because he had called me a patriot on NBC News. I was reading the lead story in the New York Times – “US Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of 2016” – with a photo of American soldiers looking for caves. I recalled not the Secretary of State but a 27-year-old Kerry, asking, as he testified to the Senate about the US troops who were still in Vietnam and were to remain for another two years: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

I wondered how a 70-year-old Kerry would relate to that question as he looked at that picture and that headline. And then there he was on MSNBC an hour later, thinking about me, too, during a round of interviews about Afghanistan that inevitably turned to Edward Snowden ahead of my fellow whistleblower’s own primetime interview that night:

There are many a patriot – you can go back to the Pentagon Papers with Dan Ellsberg and others who stood and went to the court system of America and made their case. Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.

On the Today show and CBS, Kerry complimented me again – and said Snowden “should man up and come back to the United States” to face charges. But John Kerry is wrong, because that’s not the measure of patriotism when it comes to whistleblowing, for me or Snowden, who is facing the same criminal charges I did for exposing the Pentagon Papers. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Edward Snowden responds to release of e-mail by U.S. officials

The Washington Post reports: Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden responded to questions from The Washington Post following the release of an e-mail he had sent while working for the National Security Agency.

Q: How do you respond to today’s NSA statement and the release of your email with the Office of General Counsel?

The NSA’s new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers – after more than a year of denying any such contact existed – raises serious concerns. It reveals as false the NSA’s claim to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of last year, that “after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.”

Today’s release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities – such as breaking into the back-haul communications of major US internet companies – are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations.

If the White House is interested in the whole truth, rather than the NSA’s clearly tailored and incomplete leak today for a political advantage, it will require the NSA to ask my former colleagues, management, and the senior leadership team about whether I, at any time, raised concerns about the NSA’s improper and at times unconstitutional surveillance activities. It will not take long to receive an answer. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA releases Snowden email, says he raised no concerns about spying

Wired reports: In response to claims by Edward Snowden that he raised concerns about NSA spying in emails sent to the spy agency’s legal office, the NSA released a statement and a copy of the only email it says it found from Snowden.

That email, the agency says, asked a question about legal authority and hierarchy but did not raise any concerns.

“NSA has now explained that they have found one e-mail inquiry by Edward Snowden to the Office of General Counsel asking for an explanation of some material that was in a training course he had just completed,” the NSA said in a statement. “The e-mail did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed. There was not additional follow-up noted.

“There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations,” the statement continued. “We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”

But Ben Wizner, Snowden’s legal advisor and director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said the NSA is being disingenuous.

“Snowden raised many complaints over many channels,” he said in a statement today. “The NSA is releasing a single part of a single exchange after previously claiming that no evidence existed.”

The email, dated April 5, 2013, which was sent shortly before Snowden departed Hawaii for Hong Kong and released thousands of NSA documents to journalists, asks a question about the agency’s mandatory USSID 18 training and Executive Orders — orders that come from the president.

In his email, Snowden asked about the hierarchy for such presidential orders, asking whether these have the same precedence as law.

“My understanding is that EOs may be superseded by federal statute, but EOs may not override statute. Am I correct in this?” he wrote. He also wanted to know which of Department of Defense regulations and regulations from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have greater precedence.

There is no mention of a concern about how the NSA is using these regulations or overstepping its legal bounds. This does not, however, rule out that other emails from Snowden exist that the NSA has not found or is not releasing. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Snowden unlikely to ‘man up’ in face of Espionage Act, legal adviser says

The Guardian reports: An adviser to Edward Snowden said on Wednesday that an unfair legal landscape made it unlikely that the NSA whistleblower would take US secretary of state John Kerry up on his invitation to “man up” and return to the United States.

In a television appearance on Wednesday morning, Kerry said that if Snowden were a “patriot”, he would return to the United States from Russia to face criminal charges. Snowden was charged last June with three felonies under the 1917 Espionage Act.

“This is a man who has betrayed his country,” Kerry told CBS News. “He should man up and come back to the US.”

Kerry’s comments came as NBC News prepared to broadcast an extended interview with Snowden on Wednesday night, beginning at 10pm ET. Snowden revealed his identity almost one year ago, on 9 June 2013.

Responding to Kerry’s comments on Wednesday, Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a legal adviser to Snowden, said the whistleblower hoped to return to the United States one day, but that he could not do so under the current Espionage Act charges, which make it impossible for him to argue that his disclosures had served the common good.

“The laws under which Snowden is charged don’t distinguish between sharing information with the press in the public interest, and selling secrets to a foreign enemy,” Wizner said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Investigation confirms U.S. snooping activities against China

Xinhua reports: A Chinese Internet information body on Monday said an investigation spanning several months has confirmed “the existence of snooping activities directed against China” as exposed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

A report by China’s Internet Media Research Center said Chinese authorities have looked into the NSA’s secret surveillance program codenamed PRISM, which is revealed by British, U.S. and Hong Kong media based on documents leaked by Snowden.

“Subsequently, an investigation carried out by various Chinese government departments over several months confirmed the existence of snooping activities directed against China,” the report said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Afghanistan hits out at U.S. spying allegations from Wikileaks

AFP reports: Afghanistan on Sunday, May 25, expressed anger at the United States for allegedly monitoring almost all the country’s telephone conversations after revelations by the Wikileaks website.

Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said on Friday, May 23, that Afghanistan was one of at least two countries where the US National Security Agency “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls”.

The Afghan government responded to the claims by ordering the interior and telecommunication ministries to stop illegal monitoring of calls, and said it would lodge a complaint with the US.

“These activities are an obvious violation of agreements based on technical use of these (telephone) stations,” said a government statement.

“Most importantly, it is a violation of the national sovereignty of Afghanistan, and a violation of the human rights guaranteed to all Afghans.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The NSA bill got to the House at warp speed. Senators are our only hope

Trevor Timm writes: In just over two weeks, the bill known as the USA Freedom Act – formerly the best chance to pass meaningful NSA reform in Congress – has gone from strong, to weak, to horrible. So naturally, after months of stalling the once-promising bill, the House of Representatives rushed to pass a gutted version on Thursday.

Now that the bill has passed, the NSA’s biggest supporters will surely line up to call this legislation “reform” so they can go back to their angry constituents and pretend they did something about mass surveillance, while really just leaving the door open for it to continue. But the bill is still a long way from the president’s desk. If the Senate refuses to pass a strengthened version of the USA Freedom Act this summer, reformers should consider what 24 hours ago was unthinkable: abandon the bill and force Section 215 of the Patriot Act to expire once and for all in 2015. Because it’s one thing to pass a weak bill, but it’s entirely another to pass off smoke and mirrors as progress.

It really is astonishing to look at how abruptly this legislation has been warped. All the major civil liberties organizations dropped their support for the USA Freedom Act as soon as the new version – re-written in secret at the last minute, with help from the NSA’s lawyers and the Obama administration – was made public on Tuesday. The privacy groups’ withdrawal was followed quickly by the major tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. But that apparently doesn’t matter to the White House or Congressional leadership, who barred amendments that could have potentially strengthened the bill from being offered on the floor ahead of Thursday’s vote. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

National security journalists say it’s only getting harder to report on intelligence agencies

Cora Currier writes: This spring, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued new policies requiring that all public writings and remarks — even by former employees — be checked beforehand for sensitive information, and circumscribing how employees can talk about classified material that’s already out in the public sphere.

Long-time intelligence reporters say it’s too soon to say whether the directives — in effect since April, and first reported earlier this month — are specifically causing sources to clam up. But the policies contribute to a climate where government sources are increasingly twitchy about talking with reporters, even on unclassified matters. In March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) expressly forbid unauthorized contact with the media for all current employees of the 17 government spy agencies it oversees.

“Clearly this is part of the post-Snowden scramble to try to control the message and control information,” said Mark Mazzetti, a New York Times national security reporter and author of a recent book on the CIA. It’s been almost a year since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began leaking documents on government surveillance, Mazzetti said, “and they’re still wrestling with this.”

Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News blog, argues that the ODNI’s new policies are a step up in government control, in that they extend beyond only regulating classified information to include “sensitive” matters. The ODNI says that the new directives just reflect a consolidation of existing practices, and they’re not as inflexible as they may seem on paper. “It is understood that there are times that former employees may receive calls for comment from the media, and there simply is not time to follow the pre-publication review process,” the ODNI wrote in a statement after the policies came to light.

“You rely on people who get out of government to give a more candid assessment of what’s going on inside it,” said Mazzetti. “We’ll have to see how it’s enforced and whether people listen to it. There will be people who will bristle at this attempt to control what they can say.”

At least so far, Jeff Stein, who covers intelligence matters for Newsweek, said that “during meetings with intelligence sources last week the order was having no apparent effect whatsoever.”

But Mazzetti noted that already, “leak investigations and revelations about surveillance capabilities are making people think twice about having any type of communication with reporters. These directives can’t help.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Computers, and computing, are broken

Quinn Norton writes: Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.

It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

For a bunch of us, especially those who had followed security and the warrantless wiretapping cases, the revelations weren’t big surprises. We didn’t know the specifics, but people who keep an eye on software knew computer technology was sick and broken. We’ve known for years that those who want to take advantage of that fact tend to circle like buzzards. The NSA wasn’t, and isn’t, the great predator of the internet, it’s just the biggest scavenger around. It isn’t doing so well because they are all powerful math wizards of doom. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Changes to surveillance bill stoke anger

The New York Times reports: Leaders of both parties in the House of Representatives, at the Obama administration’s request, have changed a surveillance overhaul bill that restricts the power of the government to obtain Americans’ records in bulk.

A revised version of the bill was unveiled on Tuesday, and the House may vote on it this week.

Several civil liberties groups that had backed a previous version argued that the changes weakened the limits in a way that leaves the door open for the government to obtain enormous volumes of records. They said they were withdrawing their support. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas

In March, the Washington Post reported: The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance. [Continue reading…]

The Intercept now reports: The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.

SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit

Ladar Levison writes: My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company’s network.

My company, Lavabit, provided email services to 410,000 people – including Edward Snowden, according to news reports – and thrived by offering features specifically designed to protect the privacy and security of its customers. I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the US government access to all of the messages – to and from all of my customers – as they travelled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet.

But that wasn’t enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company’s private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords – which were sent securely – so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company’s encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my “noncompliance”.)

Bothered by what the agents were saying, I informed them that I would first need to read the order they had just delivered – and then consult with an attorney. The feds seemed surprised by my hesitation.

What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days, ending not only my startup but also destroying, bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it – that we all have a right to personal privacy. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail