Chilling effects of the surveillance state [Glyn Moody, ComputerWorld UK]:
Groklaw is shutting down, as a direct result of the revelations that the world’s communications – including our emails – are being spied upon by the NSA and GCHQ. That’s a huge loss for the open source world: Groklaw played an immensely important part in fighting off the absurd but dangerous SCO attack on free software. Alongside that main work it has conducted countless legal analyses of various other attempts to use patents and copyright to undermine open source. And it has done it applying the open source method of collaboration, a significant achievement in itself.
But the guiding force behind Groklaw, PJ, feels she can’t go on when something so fundamental as the privacy of her communications can no longer be taken for granted. In her final post, she compares the feeling to an earlier one when her flat was broken into, and someone went through all her belongings.
More: Brian Barrett, Gizmodo. We’ve cited Groklaw a number of times in this space.
Not unrelated: “What Should, and Should Not, Be in NSA Surveillance Reform Legislation” [Electronic Frontier Foundation]
3 Comments
crap.
If I may be permitted to make a normative claim: It’s the FISA secret court that should be shutting down, not cool sites like Groklaw and others
I’m sorry, but I can’t believe that’s the reason. If you have ANY technical knowledge at all, you know that nothing is private on the internet, ESPECIALLY email. 99.999% of all email is sent via an unencrypted transport method, and of that I doubt there’s 1 in 1M emails that contain encrypted content.
Sorry, but I don’t accept that reasoning at all. Better to stand up to the bully then cry in disrepair and go hide in a corner.