Will Obama's legacy be to reintroduce slavery?: Obama threatens jail for man who wants to shut down business
When Federal government demands backdoor to his system, Lavabit Founder, Ladar Levison, wants to shut Down His Service and Feds respond by threatening his arrest. Threatening someone with jail for shutting down their business sure sounds like Obama is demanding that they continue working at a particular job and do that job a particular way even when they don't want to do it. Isn't that what slavery is? From NBC News:
The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.
"I could be arrested for this action," Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden.
Lavabit said he was barred by federal law from elaborating on the order or any of his communications with federal prosecutors. But a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison's lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered -- stating that Levison may have "violated the court order," a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court. . . .
Levison, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who ran his company out of a Dallas apartment, said in a public statement last Thursday that he made "the difficult decision" to shut down Lavabit because he did not want "to become complicit in crimes against the American people." . . .
Levison stressed that he has complied with "upwards of two dozen court orders" for information in the past that were targeted at "specific users" and that "I never had a problem with that." But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service. . . .Fortunately, President Obama assures us that there is no domestic spying.
Labels: NSAgate, thugishgovernment
posted by John Lott at 11:07 PM
3 Comments:
Good for him.
I just hope he destroys ALL the records if he hasn't done so yet.
The only real solution is encryption at the source, preferably by separate software not built into the email program. That way nothing in the email system sees the real message before encryption. Of course, the enigma is that the recipient has to be able to decode the message, so the sender has to provide a key without letting everybody have it. We could have many keys, each one for one recipient or a few of them.For a little added fun, we could hide the real message in a much longer text, with the extraneous text encrypted with one or more bogus keys that would not decode the real message.
The law that covers this type of action is Title 18 USC section 1584.
However, it is routinely bypassed via what is known as 'Civil Contempt' charge(s) being brought against an individual which allows the Court to imprison one for debt, or in this case for attempting to change one's employment.
The above is routinely used to imprison persons who fail to pay child support, which has established this as case law.
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