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Auteur: Caleb James DeLisle
Datum:  
Aan: System undo crew
Onderwerp: Re: [unSYSTEM] What Lavabit built was no less than a marvel
Hi guys,
Thanks Amir for the invite.

For those who don't know me, a little about myself:
I started the cjdns project and I'm very interested in community aspects
of open source. I think as developers we try to make the most secure software
possible without realizing that no project can exist without a collaborative
community. I think the overt security features in TOR, I2P and to some extent
Bitcoin, nurture the suspicious and treacherous aspects of human nature which
damage the community on which the project depends.

I hope to have some interesting discussions about the state of the System we
have, what kind of System we want, and the smoothest way to transition.

Thanks,
Caleb


On 08/10/2013 03:32 PM, Amir Taaki wrote:
> cjd sent me this. he's on the list now too.
>
> ---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
> Subject: Change of email address
> From:    "Caleb James DeLisle" <cjd@???>
> Date:    Fri, August 9, 2013 11:26 pm
> To:      "Caleb James DeLisle" <cjd@???>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

>
> As some of you probably already know, my former email address and the
> provider
> of my email service, Lavabit.com, is no more.
>
> Four years ago I was searching for a free email provider when I found
> lavabit.com.
> It wasn't the only mail provider around but I was attracted to the cute geeky
> minimalism of the website and the earnest if not naive dedication to
> privacy. In an age
> when privacy is seen as an old thing like chivalry or neat handwriting,
> lavabit stood
> alone, fighting the market for what they believed in. Fighting for the
> belief that a
> moment shared between friends, family or loved ones is more than a datum
> to be
> refined into marketing intelligence. While we the web2.0 kids flagrantly
> exposed
> ourselves, they stood by like a patient father, believing that we were
> worth more than
> that, and betting their very livelihood that we would come to recognize
> modesty in
> a digital age.
>
> What Lavabit built was no less than a marvel. They used cryptography to
> assure that
> your email could not be read without your login password, even by the
> administrator
> of the lavabit server. Over the past 4 years I've recommended only Lavabit
> to friends
> and family and I had only one major email address myself. Lavabit was
> obviously a
> labor of love, privacy just isn't profitable. Since I had only my word of
> mouth to offer,
> I didn't mind the occasional outage or the emails sending slowly. The
> bumps along the
> road were just part of the charm.
>
> Five days ago Lavabit stopped responding, this was not a major issue it
> had happened
> before but after twelve hours of downtime I became worried. I decided to
> sit tight and
> see what happens and after about two days and a steadily growing mob of
> fellow
> users began complaining on the web, the owner finally decided to pull the
> plug.
>
> The Lavabit homepage which had previously said only that the site was down
> for
> maintenance now read that the operator, Ladar Levison, had chosen to shut
> down the
> site rather than "become complicit in crimes against the American people"
> and that a
> gag order prevented him from saying anything else. Over time it became
> known that
> Lavabit had been ordered to provide information in previous child abuse
> cases and
> had readily complied (in so far as their cryptography would allow) so
> whatever happened
> this time had to have been more extreme than a routine search warrant. It
> also became
> known that the tiny email provider has been used by none other than Edward
> Snowden.
>
> If agents demand that the post office hand over letters, those letters
> still need to be
> opened leaving obvious evidence that they had been read. In a computer
> there is no
> such evidence so the same demand placed upon an email provider, requires
> that they
> deceive their own customers by implying that everything is normal. This
> demand that
> Ladar breach the trust of his users and actively conspire against them is
> probably what
> pushed him over the edge.
>
> Whatever it might have been, lavabit and calebdelisle@??? are no
> more.
> My past email is safe because I always preferred to download my email to
> my laptop
> using Thunderbird mail. Although it is indeed inconvenient to change my
> address I am
> proud to have been in a small way associated with a Man who as far as we
> know, stood
> to the end for what he believed in.
>
> After four years with Lavabit, can't bring myself to use Gmail or Hotmail
> or any other of
> the glitzy glamorous mail services who would no doubt roll over at the
> drop of a hat so
> I'm the proud user number one of the new hyperboria.ca mail service. It
> isn't as nice as
> gmail and it isn't as secure as lavabit but it's run by people, myself
> included, who think
> that email is more than a tool to collect marketing information.
> Hyperboria.ca is only
> accessible to members of the Hyperboria network because I don't have the
> time nor the
> will to run a "real" mail server.
>
> If everybody does just one thing for the sake of privacy, use Thunderbird.
> You can use it
> with your normal email account and once you've tried it you'll never go
> back to typing
> passwords into a website. With Thunderbird you can not only have your
> email on your PC
> instead of "in the cloud" but you can also use the Enigmail PGP extension.
> PGP stands for
> "Pretty Good Privacy" and it allows you to send mail which nobody but the
> recipient can
> read. I use PGP to email my mom, not because we "have something to hide"
> but because a
> conversation between a mother and son is not a national security matter
> and it certainly
> isn't "marketing intelligence". We are people, we are worth more than that
> and you are too.
> If you're not technically inclined then ask a friend or family member, if
> they're not familiar
> with Thunderbird and PGP then it's high time they learned!
>
> Thanks,
> Caleb
>
> tl;dr new email is cjd@???
>
>
>
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