Both of these solutions are distributed, encrypted entirely (even metadata) and solve email's privacy problems.

[0] http://freenetproject.org/freemail.html

[1] http://i2pbote.i2p.us/

The Tor Anonymity Router mentions the types of monitoring they attempt to subvert, and mention that full internet monitoring is not one of their design goals. This is simply because with any low-latency system, correlation between the entry and exit can be obtained. Similar attacks exist for networks such as Bitcoin for similar reasons.

> But what journalists who need to communicate more anonymously that that used pseudonymous PGP keys - one per story

In this case you run into troubles with authenticity. Without persistent keys being authenticated in some way (see "web of trust"), there's no way in telling if the person is communicating with a government proxy or the real target journalist.

That's the issue with the "encrypt everything" mantra, authenticity is stupid difficult to verify.

I think something sufficiently secure is possible for email. I think it would require a whole new set of protocols and approaches, and for some things (like voice) it is not.

I disagree. Let's use all our skills and avenues, not just some of them.

> We succumb to terror pushing away meaningless bits of code on Github as a crypto projects in response.

That is a subjective opinion. Email itself is meaningless bits of code. You want us to stop using email altogether? What about the web? Why are you even posting on this forum so?

> Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets.

That is alarmist hyperbole.

> Giving you a salary for technician work keeping infrastructure ticking. Enough enabling the beastly mess that is privatized 'national' security. The payments to infrastructure providing companies for data access. The kidnapping/torture/drone fire of others when technological routes don't work. If you have a career with Dell, AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and many others, start making demands or make resumes. Stop being complicit.

Dell? A computer hardware device assembler? What on earth are you on about. You appear to think that the entire info-tech infrastructure, companies and "wage-slaves" alike are complicit in all this. Computers are a kind of tool, you can use them for beneficial, neutral or nefarious means. Let's keep the spotlight where it is needed -- on the secrest out-of-control governmental surveillance organs of various nation states.

In short. Think a bit before you post and spare us the melodrama.

>Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets.

What in the fuck does this even mean? How is it relevant? The only problem with "fresh" crypto projects is that if you fuck it up, and you have bad crypto, it's as good as no crypto.

Most of us here don't work for those companies, nor do most people being spied on, so this advice sucks.

Legislation and regulation are the long-term methods of stopping this, but the short-term method of dealing with a technological problem is better technology.

The code still has a purpose, even if it's not the "right" solution, long-term.

Many of the people at these businesses you mention are wage slaves and they can't so easily just get up and leave.

Code gives us tools. Such is a start, but only a start. We need solid, internationally federated businesses, which can be built to take on this challenge. Yes open sourcing the tools is important too, but only as a means to an end.

We need to build up an infrastructure for actually using these tools and that means businesses offering services.

I do not have time to do another business (I am ramping up two businesses right now). I do have time to consult, advocate, and advise on this very important topic.

Crypto sucks hard for beginners and it's pretty much in diapers.

Unfortunately, the majority of wage-slaves are so indentured to their overlords that simply leaving is not an option, as the alternative is penury and starvation - particularly when you work for a giant like BAH, who'll ensure nobody will ever employ you again.

If you want to make a stand, don't hand in your notice, don't make a resume, don't make demands, just don't show up, and let 'em flail. Worst they'll do is fire you, and in today's world you do not need to pledge fealty to an employer in order to survive, and the fewer people that do, the more rapidly things will change.

If all the IT folks simply walked away from their machines, they would stop working, but we do not, and instead we strive to make their machines work perfectly without our intervention.

Jump ship before they decide to push you overboard, anyway - because they will. If you think your employer respects you, and will give you a job for life... you are wilfully deceiving yourself.

Nearly 200 years ago, de Tocqueville asked why the American experiment in self-government succeeded while its French counterpart led to the guillotine, mob excesses, and ultimate tyranny and he gave a complex answer whose core was that private moral restraints in the populace served to check the unbounded passions in people that lead to oppression. In other words, the private life that each of us leads will hugely influence the way we are governed.

Governments are always ready to grab the greatest degree of power that the people will give them. That is the default because it is hard-wired into the human condition. And this is the major factor not grasped by those today who assume that society is evolving to a point that, if only right-thinking people with good motives are given enough power over our lives, they will somehow magically transform society for the good through government action. In reality, if any persons - right-thinking or not - are given largely unchecked authority over our lives, abuses will inevitably follow. As they gather huge amounts of power, their purpose in life becomes to guard that power jealously and to increase it as opportunities permit. No bureau has ever abolished itself. Farm programs from the depression era thrive today as ever, though the logic for their existence has long since vanished. Politicians of all stripes promote expanded budgets for their own areas of preferred government expansion and spend money they don't even have in vast quantities with little or no accountability to the people they supposedly serve.

This is why it is vital in a free society that its people be educated and morally grounded to value their rights as individuals and to resist and distrust unchecked authority in the state. Do we have that today? Perhaps, but only in a very weakened form. Many people today do not even give pause over the idea that the government claims huge amounts of unchecked power, whether it is to fight terrorists or to expand social programs. There is very little residue in our society of the old-fashioned principled belief that it is wrong to have vast centralized power with very few checks upon it. In her sign off piece, PJ notes: "Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That's not the rule of law as I understood the term." This is lamentable but it is a mere symptom, and not the cause, of our ills. Politicians make the law as they go, with no accountability, only because they are allowed to do so by those whom they govern. And, if someone already has vast power over you, it is but a small step to extend that power in a technological age by using technology to spy upon, intimidate, and control people. Why, when these leaders are allowed to lord it over us as they see fit, should they suddenly develop scruples in gathering information that only serves to enhance their power to do what we are already letting them do without so much as a peep of principled opposition?

Privacy is in significant peril, and it is a serious loss when Groklaw goes down over this issue. But assaults on privacy are but a symptom of a deeper malady as modern society increasingly believes that it can hand over massive forms of unchecked government to its politicians in the naive belief that such power can be used wisely if only we have right-thinking leaders at the helm. The answer, as de Tocqueville noted years ago, is not to place faith in leaders but rather to take personal responsibility in our lives and to curtail the powers of those who govern. I guess we shall just have to wait and see if this is possible today.

In the meantime, we can praise those who fight the good fight, and PJ has been a supreme example of this. Tireless, talented, and astute, she has been a wonderful force for good over the past decade. May she find a powerful new outlet for those talents as she moves forward, even in a difficult environment.

PJ feels extremely genuine here, she is definitely not using this as an excuse.

Wow. There is something very unhealthy in the air or in the water these days. Lots of people seem to be totally immune to the consequences of rampant surveillance and frankly bizarre powers executed by the current set of governments. And all that in the name of the war on some nebulous entity that could not even capitulate if it wanted to (and that's assuming such central command and control even exists).

2013 is fast shaping up to be a year of notoriety, so many things happening in so many places that are all linked to governments overstepping their powers.

Who would have thought 20 years ago that we'd see US whistleblowers hiding in Russia of all places. That there would be meaningful comparisons drawn between the Russian government and the UK government when it comes to dealing with the press, that we'd see torture committed by the people we routinely thought of as the good guys.

It's a weird world we are living in at the moment.

Since comments are turned off there:

Thank you PJ for all the extremely hard work and the dedication. A lot of good came from this, I'm quite sure that there were some cases where both the plaintive and the defense were spending as much time reading groklaw as they were reading their email. It certainly counted for something.

There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, making the abuse and surveillance of Internet more relevant than it needs to be.

I find it hilarious that in most of the threads I've read on here for months, that people who have actually lived in oppressive regimes say that the US is at least displaying a likelihood of being on the slow descent to Hell, while people in the US are quick to point out that it's still fine because we have elections and we aren't being forced out onto the streets and shot in the back of the head.

Read any book on history, strategy, authoritarianism or "real" conspiracies and it's abundantly clear that the best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume; I will not be surprised when we find out in 30-50 years that the tech companies were not only complicit in passive surveillance, but in active manipulation to control public opinion and perception.

Further, people self-actualize and learn to evolve to higher ideals, so once you debase intelligent debate/freedom of expression and make every personal detail of a person's life that passes over an electronic medium open to dissection and survellience, you debase the minds of the people as a whole and open the door to committing worse atrocities.

It's actually less difficult than it was 50-100 years ago to control public opinion. Before, you'd have to burn books and control every major newspaper and broadcasting corporation. Now you can just astroturf on Reddit or Twitter, or edit Wikipedia is subtle ways, and have the same effect.

I gotta say that stopping Groklaw, which is a public site anyway, because someone else might be reading it, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, despite the emotional ploys in this article. She can write and save drafts locally in a (GASP) local word processor and encrypt anything she chooses to upload to remote storage. The government will then not be able to read unfinished Groklaw articles. Does this resolve the issue?

This whole article should've just been a public key and a PO box address with this note: "I will not acknowledge plaintext mail. If you are uncomfortable transmitting encrypted data over the wire, please send a USB disk to this box."

In the last few weeks quite a few providers of private communications and/or freedom (for some definition of freedom) have shut down. Lavabot, Freedom Hosting, etc. If the US could shut down The Guardian they would.

This leaves fewer and fewer secure channels for private communication, and less and less information about what is actually going on.

This is an incredibly dangerous road to walk down, and is akin to the Intelligentsia leaving Germany in the 20's. We all know how that ended.

(1) edited his to her - thanks for pointing it out rolux

And yet, when taken as part of the whole picture that is the internet, government surveillance is little more than a drop in the ocean. While governments may collect a possibly significant amount of correspondence and analyze some of it, almost all online data, e-mail correspondence as well as photos and documents, search history, browsing history, our physical location, the driving, running and cycling routes we take, the busses we use and more, is constantly collected, analyzed monitored and used, all day every day, by private corporations. These corporations are even less subject to oversight than any democratically elected institution, and their employees are less carefully screened.

Government surveillance is wrong, but at least it raises an outrage that, in time, is almost certain to bring about change. Corporate surveillance is a more dangerous beast. It employs manipulation and deceit rather than plain-old secrecy, and worst of all – it causes little outrage.

Some have compared the current state of things to George Orwell's Big Brother government, but those who've read the book know that Big Brother does not rule through secrecy and intimidation. Big Brother is never mistrusted, never hated, and never feared or suspected. People subject themselves to his control willingly. Big Brother is loved. That is how absolute power is gained. And that is why a democratic institution has little hope of ever attaining Big Brother status, especially in America where any government is automatically suspect. The real danger to our privacy and our freedom, the true potential Big Brother and the danger that dwarfs any government surveillance online, is Google, Facebook and their ilk.

don't do this. Since 1999, email providers in Switzerland are forced to keep all logs and data for one year (currently in discussion to prolong this to 5 years) and hand all data over at the authorities request.

If you don't comply you will be punished by fines or even jail.

I once (early 2000s) received one of these orders and I honestly don't remember whether it had a judges signature, but I think it was just some police officer signing it, so I can't be sure whether there was (and is) any court oversight.

If you want your conversations to be confidential, don't choose a Swiss provider.

What it seems to come down to is the general fear that the NSA COULD, from a technical perspective, be reading specific unencrypted emails. But before the recent news stories, did PJ (or anyone else) really send and receive emails thinking "there is no way the NSA, or anyone else, can see this email"?

As far as chilling effects go, the knowledge that a multi-billion dollar signals intelligence agency is technically capable of reading an unencrypted email seems pretty mild. Is free speech and free communication really so fragile that it rests on the idea that casual communication you make no special effort to protect is totally out of the reach of large police or intelligence organizations?

In both the US and where I am in Australia, the two major parties are barely different and doubly so in regards to this whole issue. A vote is not going to mean a great deal.

But a vote that can make some difference is voting with our wallets. Can very conscious purchasing decisions made by more and more people remove some of the influence held by the very richest on our planet? Is that too dreamy?

Where possible, I try to avoid purchasing from the biggest brand in any category, but there'd be a lot, lot more I could do about this. If we imagine the typical food pyramid, but fill it with brands and apply it to every product and category showing the richest and most influential at one end and the delightful smallfry at the other, could we help motivate people to make better decisions about where they spend their money? Or even where they earn it? Earn a fraction less to work for a smaller supplier perhaps.

Apps, surveys, social media, gamification - these are all things that might help people make more careful decisions. Ride a bike, grow food or buy from independent greengrocers at least, seek out furniture that's locally made, etc.

Give me a site/app that asks me about my life and rates my efforts or motivates me to make a better choice in everything I do. Help me identify brands that feel independent but are actually owned by corporate monsters.

Code will not be enough, the system only respects one thing, money. If enough people move to services outside of the States, the real people in power will tell the government to reinstate at least some civil liberties and human rights. But even then, don't expect too much.

As mixmax said, this is "akin the Intelligentsia leaving Germany in the 20's." It will start with moving to hosting and services outside the country and will eventually be followed by people physically leaving the country. As James Joyce said, "silence, cunning... exile"!

It's not so bad. I've been an expat for 26 years and I've never looked back.

He wrote:

First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

I agree it's upsetting and citizens should be demanding oversight. But to assume your plaintext transmissions over uncontrolled wires are somehow private seems absurd. It's like the silliness people got whipped into over Google's WiFi collection which was essentially passing "-s 0" instead of "-s 64" to tcpdump.

A 1 GB USB costs approximately 4$ , you can encrypt the information and use the regular mail with no return address. To avoid cameras in the post office you can use a 3rd party or a real world dropbox.

This sounds so sci-fi dystopian it's hard to believe it actually a plausible solution.

ps. Don't forget to use gloves, make sure "they" can't track your purchase, and also check if the drive is clean as a whistle.

I do not know whether this - i.e. shutting down - is a good strategy in general. It raises some awareness, it might cause some change ... but what if change does not happens? What other means of protest will we have?

I was under the (probably wrong) impression that most of what Groklaw did was explain the law and court cases in simple terms.

Have they resigned themselves to it? Are they devising new corporate communication policies that assume always-on surveillance? Are they thinking things will improve after this storm has passed?

Snowden uses Lavabit email service. Snowden leaks top secret material belonging to US and UK. US demands Snowden's emails from Lavabit. Lavabit shuts down.

pj reads news of Lavabit and concludes that email is not anonymous. (Email was never truly anonymous, unless you count anonymous remailers. Surely she knew this.) pj concludes that she should shut down Groklaw. (Why not just warn everyone that she will comply with legal requirements, like Google and myriad other web-based businesses do, for example. Millions of people still use these services even with that warning.) pj concludes that she should no longer use "the internet" (cf. email). (Huh? Email is but one use of the internet; it was designed ages ago and was never intended to be anonymous.)

Are people who leak top secret material and are wanted by US authorities sending emails to pj? If not, then please help me understand pj's logic.

If Snowden sent emails to pj, and pj, like Lavabit, does not wish to comply with authorities and hand over whatever they've got, then I guess shutting down Groklaw makes sense. I guess.

You cannot have a right to privacy as Brandeis envisioned it when you lack any reasonable expectation of privacy. Reading pj's post it sounds like she's abandoned _all_ expectations of privacy with respect to the internet (which includes email among so many other potential uses). This reeks of "all-or-nothing" thinking.

Lawmakers have no reason to exceed the expectations of their employers. If you the voter and taxpayer expect zero privacy, you should not be surprised if that's what is delivered.

"While we’re happy to provide a privacy asylum in a safe legislation, society should not need them. Privacy should be the default, not the exception."

So it's come down to privacy asylums and digital refugee camps now. WTF?

This is how I've been feeling about it for the last few weeks.

Now I'm reading this story, in which pj explains her story which was exactly my point from the comment linked above. What's the deal?

Anyhow, yes, when the sum of human communication is read by the US government (and other governments and private intel corporations) then it's incredibly destructive to the human condition and society.

We're fucked. Time to start fixing this for real. Open up your IDE's and/or text editors and get to work. Make sure to open source (GPL or Affero GPL) everything. Work on decentralized P2P encrypted networking. Good projects: cjdns ... see you on the flip side. Hack the Planet!

Little do they know that privilege is given at the behest of the oppressor, and can be revoked instantaneously.

I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this.

    I have now gotten for myself an email there,
    p.jones at mykolab.com in case anyone wishes
    to contact me over something really important
    and feels squeamish about writing to an email
    address on a server in the US.

Switching to Kolab is false comfort for people who are "squeamish" about sending mail to "a server in the US".

I'd love to see PJ publish her public key and encourage people to learn how to use it.

Thank you, PJ, for the invaluable and remarkable work you have done for the FOSS community and, as a consequence, wider society in general over the years. On a personal note, thank you also for helping me with some research for a paper I was writing a couple of years back even though you were a busy person.

As for whistleblowers — it's all about politics and “your enemy is my friend” between States and Russan rustlers.

Bruce Willis said it best. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD94dVu8lqQ

I really hope that people look not only into the current list of abuses, but also into the whole nature of government that _inevitably_ led to this point.

Band-aids and spin doctors are not going to make these problems go away. At best they'll just make the problems go further underground so that we don't hear about them as often in the news.

Do you think the NSA is looking to cut back its authority or is it looking to prevent public awareness of this kind of thing in the future?

The comparison that some have made between the US Government and Stasi is more accurate than you think, with regards of Zersetzung:

> By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that methods of overt persecution which had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. It was realised that psychological harassment was far less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance, given that they would often not be aware of the source of their problems, or even its exact nature. Zersetzung was designed to side-track and "switch off" perceived enemies so that they would lose the will to continue any "inappropriate" activities.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung

Data mining is a very interest challenge and represents a major step in large-scale computing technology, but it pales in comparison to data manipulation.

Imagine for a moment if the intelligence-surveillance apparatus were redirected outward: methods used for parsing human communication would be re-purposed for disseminating seemingly-human propaganda. Who you're responding to on Twitter, reddit, or HN may not be a person.

Imagine for a moment if spammers were quite a bit more convincing in their emails, and that their poor grammar and spelling were improved.

That brought back a quote from a past: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

I had to look it up to get the exact wording right. Was only half surprised that it comes from Orwell's 1984.

  There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, making the abuse and surveillance of Internet more relevant than it needs to be.

The same sentiment is extended to any service, which requires me to have a Facebook (or any other social media) account.

see: the cultural revolution

I still agree with you, though.. PGP is pretty good, after all :)

The NSA probably isn't storing all the contents of voice calls either, but it really doesn't matter all that much. They can still tell who you communicate with when and how often. That's not conducive to democracy or free speech.

Furthermore, because of how few people use GnuPG or other such tools, I would expect you'd only be targeted harder for using them.

I'm sure she can, but by doing so has reduced the set of people capable of sending her mail significantly by imposing the requirement that they figure out GnuPG before they send her an email.

Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.

pj = Pamela Jones

But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London.

It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.

That's stupid. Of course they wouldn't. They would require them to stop reporting on the security state. But that is vastly different from shuttering them all together.

The Guardian certainly performs a public service in a variety of other domains (from which the government can and does benefit). The security state just doesn't want the press banging around in their domain.

Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.

... usually don't destroy hard drives of journalists or don't detain people as a matter of harrassment just to name two recent actions undertaken by governments who use their introspective powers to take conclusions ("we have to have this Miranda guy") and act upon them ("we know he's in Berlin. Check the flight records")

The point is that the control of the governments does not seem to work anymore OR, at the same time addressing that "Big Brother is loved": nobody cares, because governmental agencies do the right thing. (That is my impression until now, living in Europe)

When you use Gmail you are sending your mail to Google, first, and then it is relayed to the recipients. When you search for driving directions to an address, you are sending data to Google that says "I want to know how to drive/cycle/walk to X location right now". When you search for some phrase you are sending a request to Google that says "I want to know about this".

There is no reason why they wouldn't hold onto that data. You sent it to them, because you want the response that they can provide. It's an exchange.

Governments have a monopoly on the use of force, on law making and on many other things that we all depend on. Governments have much greater powers than any particular corporation, and hence the abuse of that power is a lot more dangerous.

i suspect that the problem is deep seated. For example, why can't just anyone enter the banking business? Why isn't there any mom & dad run banks - small, local banks with customers they can could with their hands (and toes)? Why is something as important as money (and teh ability to lend it out) controlled by so few?

Suggested courses of action?

Tried and didn't work:

* voting

* not voting

* protesting online / offline

* writing about these issues, raising awareness

What options do we have left? Violence? Hopefully there's more.

Hashtag: #fnf13

The pirate parties together with other organizations all over the world plan to join in. Spread the message and contact me if you plan to organize something.

Tell me. You're speaking with a friend in a public square or park in your town. You're not speaking in code with your friend. Judging by what you just said I expect you assume your every conversation is being monitored.

We have certain expectations of privacy and basic human decency. Just because it's possible to wiretap and hoover up all unencrypted communications I wouldn't have concluded that the spooks are doing so because I would have thought they wouldn't stoop to this behaviour. Sure there was a little bit of info here and there but there's nothing like hard evidence (Snowden-style) for changing ones mind.

You don't have to show us all how smart you are, we know already -- so you can keep these types of comments to yourself.

That sort of information comes from having serious inside, in-depth background information.

You know, the sort of stuff serious investigative journalists /used/ to do. Like the Washington Post in 1972 when they reported on illegal activity by the President (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal#Role_of_the_m...) rather than the Washington Post in 2013 when the report on Presidential Broccoli (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/07...).

We've seen a rare example of serious investigative journalism and how /our/ countries respond to it by targeting family and loved ones of the journalists. That's the way we used to say only the KGB or the Gestapo behaved in the Bad Old Days. Guess what ? The Bad Old Days are right here and right now.

No wonder PJ is concerned that continuing Groklaw may expose her to serious risk from the authorities. Commenting on court cases and filling in the background through back-channel information from Deep Throat (or whatever pseudonym they use today) sure does not seem to be worth that risk to me.

It's sad that any comment on this stuff makes it sound like you go around wearing a tin-foil hat.

Oh, and she did all of the above in simple terms. Groklaw is easily one of the best blogs ever. Sad day to see PJ go.

It's easy to feel helpless and isolated, to feel like you can't do anything because the government is so big and you're so small. Realise that this feeling of helplessness is not based in reality. It is fostered; not by some kind of global conspiracy between government and business, but because it serves the interests of powerful people and institutions everywhere. There is no need for them to cooperate, for them to get together in shady backrooms to decide how next to disempower you. Their interests just happen to align.

But that isolation is not something you're forced into. You can break free. It's not easy, but if people suffering under military dictatorships can do it, then in our (still) relatively free society, we can do it too.

Anyone who feels like this should read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I'm rereading it these days (relistening, actually), and while it's certainly not perfect, you'll get a lot out of the shift in viewpoint.

So you intent of fixing just a small point of the whole mess (the surveillance thing) and not the overall mess (bad governments, something that affects 100% of our life and countries)?

Not to mention there is nothing to fix this way. Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time.

And of course, as long as the current political situation in the US lasts, cloud services in the US cannot be trusted. Run your own server, or use a server abroad.

I think these systems cannot work :(

If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies.

Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(

The problem with what we discovered a few months ago is that the government can use fiduciary duty of the officers of these companies against the companies and they can do so in a way that guarantees that the executives won't talk about the abuse. They made demands for access and every corporation in the world knows that when push comes to shove, you don't want to piss off any organization that can unleash the IRS on your bookkeeping. And if someone does push back, its possible that there were additional threats of jail time for obstructing justice or contempt of court. Add to that the ability to gag anyone with an NSL and you have a situation that is wide open to abuse.

Unlike corporations, the people don't really have real recourse for transgressions of the NSA, CIA or LEO in general when it involves secrets that we are not privileged to, especially not any recourse within the capabilities of the common man (unless you are a common man within those institutions and you're willing to give up everything to whistleblow). Most attempts to sue get thrown out on state secrets grounds. All we have left is the ability to vote, but its pretty clear from some of the facts that that is unlikely to make any difference for most voters since the only people who knew what was going on were on the intelligence committees and even then both the ICs in both houses and the FISA court have admitted that they don't have any real oversight.

Facing this reality, I'm not entirely surprised people like pj at groklaw and ll at lavabit are checking out.

For a non-US company that does anything remotely sensitive or competitive on an international level, it's simply insane to use, say, Google's cloud services.

I don't know to what extent Google depends on foreign corporate clients -- but I'd be surprised if this wasn't something they were very seriously concerned about.

(And the recent revelations about the NSA are really just the icing on the cake. If there is high demand for some confidential data, it's likely that there will be supply.)