Ken White at Popehat writes:

For ten years Pamela Jones has run Groklaw, a site collecting, discussing, and explaining legal developments of interest to the open-source software community. Her efforts have, justifiably, won many awards.

She’s done now…Pamela Jones is ending Groklaw because she can’t trust her government. She’s ending it because, in the post-9/11 era, there’s no viable and reliable way to assure that our email won’t be read by the state — because she can’t confidently communicate privately with her readers and tipsters and subjects and friends and family.

You should read the whole Groklaw post on this, and really take the moral of the story to heart: The internet is not a safe way to transmit confidential communications. That is a real conclusion reached by real lawyers, and it’s hard to imagine someone making an argument to the contrary.

9 replies on “The Internet Is Not Confidential”

  3. 1) What a complete wuss.

    2) PJ was a paralegal, not a lawyer (according to wikipedia, anyway).

    3) Here’s something any litigation lawyer/paralegal would know: nothing is private anyway unless it is inside some kind of legal privilege. If someone credibly alleged PJ harmed them, every last thing she had written on the subject, including private e-mails or a handwritten diary, would have to be handed over. Persons/prosecutors investigating a crime would have the same access. It didn’t start with 9/11 or FISA or anything, it’s simply the legal system: if there’s evidence you harmed someone, it’s not private unless it’s within a very well-defined sphere of privilege.

    4) Here’s something anyone with common sense should know: if the government chooses to prosecute someone based on their snooping into private e-mail, it had better make damn sure it’s ready for the backlash such a prosecution would produce. In other words, it would have to be extremely bad conduct to be worth risking the entire snooping apparatus.

    5) That gets you back to how we all live: if you aren’t doing anything shitty, you probably have nothing at all to worry about as you live your extremely privileged life in Our Friendly Surveillance State.

  4. Dear @Commenty:

    1) It’s weird how bent out of shape you are that someone is retiring.

    2) We are all being surveilled. However, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you just become the white noise NSA has to wade through to get to the “bad guys.”

  5. Wow Colin, Number 5 puts you in bed with the Nazi’s. It’s easy enough to make statements like that until they find something that you never thought was wrong in your communications and they decide to exploit it for all it’s worth. Your version of doing something shitty and theirs may be completely different.

  6. Cute, people think it’s just the internet the NSA is monitoring. The NSA is currently constructing an unprecedentedly massive spy complex in Utah that will in the words of James Bamford, be capable of collecting “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

    http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/f…

  7. “The NSA is currently constructing an unprecedentedly massive spy complex in Utah…”

    Spindles, you’re starting to become a parody of yourself.

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