I guess this could also go under the topic about the government forcing you to provide services....Last month, Levison reportedly received an order -- probably a National Security Letter -- to allow the NSA to eavesdrop on everyone's e-mail accounts on Lavabit. Rather than "become complicit in crimes against the American people," he turned the service off. Note that we don't know for sure that he received a NSL -- that's the order authorized by the Patriot Act that doesn't require a judge's signature and prohibits the recipient from talking about it -- or what it covered, but Levison has said that he had complied with requests for individual e-mail access in the past, but this was very different.
So far, we just have an extreme moral act in the face of government pressure. It's what happened next that is the most chilling. The government threatened him with arrest, arguing that shutting down this e-mail service was a violation of the order.
There it is. If you run a business, and the FBI or NSA want to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, they believe they can do so, solely on their own initiative. They can force you to modify your system. They can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once they do that, you no longer control that part of your business. You can't shut it down. You can't terminate part of your service. In a very real sense, it is not your business anymore. It is an arm of the vast U.S. surveillance apparatus, and if your interest conflicts with theirs then they win. Your business has been commandeered.
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