Amid the ongoing saga of the NSA and our government's never-ending disregard for our privacy and liberty, yet another incredible set of events are occurring.
On August 9, a small email provider, Lavabit, abruptly shut down its service rather than comply with an NSA request to monitor any and all of their customer's accounts. Lavabit provided encrypted email without any logging, meaning that requests for users' data could not be fulfilled as such data did not exist - or it was encrypted in such a way as to be unreadable. Days later, Lavabit's founder has been threatened with criminal charges for shuttering his business rather than comply with domestic spying.
The same day, another email provider, Silent Circle, decided without warning to delete all their users' email from their own servers and discontinue all email services. This was done to prevent government reading email headers and gathering information about users, their location and their personal correspondence. For Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke, the writing was on the wall:
Janke says that news triggered an emergency conversation with Phil Zimmermann, a Silent Circle founder who in 1991 created the e-mail encryption protocol known as PGP for “pretty good privacy” (see “An App Keeps Spies Away from Your iPhone”). “Once we saw what happened with Lavabit, we realized it wasn’t days, it was hours that we had to make a decision,” Janke says. But he adds that he never did receive [an NSA] request.
