The Snowden Affair

delft said:

This is going to costs US companies vast amounts of money. It shows the background to the trouble Huawei and ZTE have in breaking into the US market and it will eventually, after several years, mean a huge loss of market share for US technology companies in China. In twenty years time the US companies will have a smaller home market than the Chinese companies and that will result in scale advantages to the Chinese companies.

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U.S. had advance notice of Britain’s plan to detain reporter Glenn Greenwald’s partner

by Billy Kenber and Karla Adam, Published: August 19

U.S. officials on Monday distanced themselves from the decision of British authorities to detain the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has exposed details of National Security Agency surveillance programs, amid questions over the documents officials may have confiscated.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that U.S. officials had received a “heads-up” that London police would detain David Miranda on Sunday, but he said the U.S. government did not request Miranda’s detention, calling it “a law enforcement action” taken by the British government.

“This was a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement and not at the request of the United States government. It’s as simple as that,” Earnest said.

Miranda, 28, was detained by British authorities at Heathrow Airport on his way back home to Rio de Janeiro, having spent the previous week in Berlin with Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has been working with Greenwald and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked NSA data to Greenwald and others.

Authorities interrogated Mi*ran*da for nine hours — the maximum allowed under the law that permitted his detention — and confiscated several items from him, including his laptop computer, cellphone, DVDs, USB sticks and video-game consoles.

Greenwald, in an e-mail on Monday, said his partner had been questioned about a variety of subjects including “what stories we were working on at that moment.”

“David was asked mostly about the work Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I were doing on NSA stories, as well as extensive information about me and Laura,” Greenwald said. “He was also asked about Brazil, the political situation in Brazil, and his friends and family.”

The Guardian said it paid for Miranda’s flights, and the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, noted Monday that although Miranda is not a journalist, “he still plays a valuable role in helping his partner do his journalistic work.”

Greenwald declined to respond to a question about whether Miranda had served as a courier for classified material related to the paper’s NSA coverage. In an earlier exchange, however, he said he expected the data would be shared with U.S. authorities but was unconcerned.

“Everything he had — for his personal use and everything else — was heavily encrypted,” Greenwald said.

Earnest declined to say whether British authorities shared with the United States any intelligence they might have extracted from Miranda, as did a spokeswoman for the State Department.

Miranda was detained under Schedule 7 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which allows authorities to question individuals traveling through airports and border areas. In a 2012 review of the act, Britain’s Home Office said that more than 97 percent of people stopped under the law are questioned for less than one hour.

Several British politicians have demanded clarification on why antiterrorism laws were used to detain Miranda. Keith Vaz, chairman of Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee, wrote to police officials Monday asking them who authorized the decision, among other things.

“It’s an extraordinary twist to a complicated story,” Vaz told the BBC on Monday morning. “They may have a perfectly reasonable explanation,” he said of the authorities who detained Miranda, “ but if this is what is going to happen, if we are going to use the act in this way, for those issues that are not related to terrorism, then at least we need to know so everyone is prepared.”

The Guardian disclosed Monday that British authorities have attempted to pressure the paper to turn over the material leaked by Snowden, or to destroy it. Rusbridger, in a column, said that at some point over the past month, security experts from the GCHQ intelligence agency oversaw the destruction of two hard drives in the Guardian’s basement, even though he pointed out to officials that the paper’s NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York.

“We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won’t do it in London,” Rus*bridger wrote.



Adam reported from London. Philip Rucker in Washington contributed to this report.

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ls11231
8/19/2013 7:31 PM GMT+0200

Given what we know so far, the pursuit of Snowden and Greenwald has reached very unusual levels. These kind of incidents don't seem worth the political embarrassment and they help to confirm Snowden/Greenwald's accusations.

Which leads me the to following conclusion. It must be the case that Snowden/Greenwald are holding back a huge bombshell that they intend to release. Something so big that it will rock our political system. The government knows this and it is forcing their hand to do whatever they can to prevent the release, because no matter what embarrassments occur it would be nothing compared to the release.

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My Fellow Users,

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. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.
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Edward Snowden’s Email Provider Shuts Down Amid Secret Court Battle

By Kevin Poulsen
08.08.13
4:02 PM

A pro-privacy email service long used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden abruptly shut down today, blaming a secret U.S. court battle it has been fighting for six weeks — one that it seems to be losing so far.

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” owner Ladar Levison wrote in a statement. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.”

Based in Texas, Lavabit attracted attention last month when NSA leaker Edward Snowden used an email account with the service to invite human rights workers and lawyers to a press conference in the Moscow airport where he was then confined. A PGP crypto key apparently registered by Snowden with a Lavabit address suggests he’s favored the service since January 2010 — well before he became the most important whistleblower in a generation.

Levison posted this message today announcing the shutdown.


My Fellow Users,

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. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.

Reading between the lines, it’s reasonable to assume Levison has been fighting either a National Security Letter seeking customer information — which comes by default with a gag order — or a full-blown search or eavesdropping warrant.

Court records show that, in June, Lavabit complied with a routine search warrant targeting a child pornography suspect in a federal case in Maryland. That suggests that Levison isn’t a privacy absolutist. Whatever compelled him to shut down now must have been exceptional.

A voicemail to Lavabit went unreturned today.

Update 19:45: Lavabit has 350,000 users who aren’t Edward Snowden, and some are decidedly unhappy with Levison’s decision, judging by a flood of angry comments posted to Lavabit’s Facebook page this afternoon.

“Too bad that I payed some years in advance to keep up the good work that now turns out to be terminated without any warning,” wrote one user. “I relied on this service which is basic for my private as professional online communication and have no idea how to migrate mails and recover mails being sent that never reached me in the past 18 hours.”

“I have my Steam account and EVERYTHING on Lavabit,” wrote another. “Please have the servers running so that we can migrate our services.”

“How am I supposed to migrate?” a third user added. “Some services require a confirmation sent to the old email address to be able to switch. I can’t believe this. I just switched to Lavabit only a couple of weeks ago to get away from Hotmail snooping my shit.”

A minority of commenters were more supportive. “Holy shit, you guys are crying over your Steam accounts,” wrote one. “Just change your email to something else. Lavabit either had to roll over for the government, compromising our privacy, or shut down service. Be happy Ladar shut it down instead of rolling over.”

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Kurt said:

I wonder how NSA internal security works. Wouldn't you have some layers of working misinformation constructs to give the numerous rank and file a different perception than actuality? The recent reports show inconsistencies like PRISM appearing for seemingly different intelligence programs.
This begs the question how much Snowden's information is worth.
If his defection and information collection did appear on any internal NSA security screen, the most natural thing would have been to feed him made up stuff intermixed with some verifiable truth. While he sees himself as a genuine whistle blower, he could have been made a patsy during his pre-defection preparation. The current reports show Snowden's considerable lack of fieldcraft, making it odd if he had more grasp of avoiding internal NSA security during his defection planning phase. Behind closed doors the NSA might be laughing their ass off and the Russians and Chinese exploit him for the media, not the intelligence value.

Click to expand...

Kurt said:

I wonder how NSA internal security works. Wouldn't you have some layers of working misinformation constructs to give the numerous rank and file a different perception than actuality? The recent reports show inconsistencies like PRISM appearing for seemingly different intelligence programs.
This begs the question how much Snowden's information is worth.
If his defection and information collection did appear on any internal NSA security screen, the most natural thing would have been to feed him made up stuff intermixed with some verifiable truth. While he sees himself as a genuine whistle blower, he could have been made a patsy during his pre-defection preparation. The current reports show Snowden's considerable lack of fieldcraft, making it odd if he had more grasp of avoiding internal NSA security during his defection planning phase. Behind closed doors the NSA might be laughing their ass off and the Russians and Chinese exploit him for the media, not the intelligence value.

Click to expand...