Submitted by So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can’t do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.I’m really sorry that it’s so. I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint.
Quaint indeed.
Groklaw is shutting down. A huge loss, as the site’s contributions to various ridiculous lawsuits, like the SCO one about Linux, or the even crazier one from Oracle about Java, were invaluable. The reasons are sound, though – without secure, private communications, the collaborative effort that is Groklaw cannot function.
A sad day.
“without secure, private communications, the collaborative effort that is Groklaw cannot function.”
As we know now, communications haven’t been secure/private for the last years and maybe never have been. That never stopped Groklaw from functioning.
People lived in the illusion that secret services also respect the law.
Would they ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo
If they have to sneak and/or infiltrate, they do not respect the gentlemen manner of asking permission, thus, by definition, are breaking the law (trespassing, etc)
But, you know, it’s for our best interest, of course.
Kochise
It was suggested somewhere that maybe PJ received a formal request to get all the communications wiretaped.
That would be a more convincing reason to bail than a sudden revelation of the lack of privacy in internet, and while I doubt Growklaw would be a high profile target for the NSA then neither are millions of inbound and outbout communications to and fro the US… yet there they are.
Edited 2013-08-20 19:23 UTC
Yeah, there are a lot of paranoid people in society that are members of just about every social group out there. Anything that confirms even a little bit of their suspicions, they freak out and assume everything they’ve ever suspected *must* be true. Its stupid. The implications of everything snowden revealed is what has happened over the past 10 years. So, with the government listening to everything I’ve been doing the consequences seem pretty trivial. Does that mean its ok for them to be listening? of course not. But if they do, it doesn’t really affect my life that much. They’ve been pretty much okay with the things I’ve been doing, apparently. I shouldn’t have to radically change the way I do anything, especially things that bring great benefits to other people, in order to continue doing things I already do. Its kind of a shame if I were to.
I might be vilified for saying this. But Larry Ellison said during his interview “The credit card companies know probably as much about you or more”.
Edited 2013-08-20 19:38 UTC
Yeah, but they don’t tend to illegally kidnap you from another country, imprison and torture you because your name sounds like another guy’s name.
Is that referencing a specific example that I’m not aware of, or just a general possibility?
On the other hand a Bank can ruin you financially, make it impossible to buy a house, get a job or do anything really. In many countries they also knowingly profit off of illegal trades and have been complicit in those trades as well. Take a look at Greece or Cyprus. That’s what a bank can do to a country.
They’ll prolly comeback.
Apparently they already shutdown once in 2011. http://www.osnews.com/story/24623/Groklaw_Calls_it_a_Day_To_Close_M…
So here we are…
Supposed by decades
Ignored at best
‘there is no free lunch’
true as never before.
Paper and ink at the embassies.
Vatican times?
Typewriters.
Technicians playing again with
transistors, capacitors and resistors.
Pins and jumpers.
Hurried working papers
of No-TCP/IP and No-WWW future protocols.
Mesh Networks.
And lots, lots of random noise…
Straight off I should say I have read the Guardian every day for four decades, I fully support the right of newspapers to expose official malpractice and think is a scandal that under the guise of protecting against terrorism journalists and those close to them are harassed because of the exposure of embarrassing new stories. I should also point out that my daughter is a journalist at the Guardian.
Having said all that I think it is a baseless exaggeration to claim that the British government threatened to, or even could, shut down a newspaper. What was threatened was to shut down this particular story, presumably through some sort of court injunction. Whether the application for such a story specific injunction would have succeeded is not certain although such injunctions are granted way too frequently in the UK usually under the guise of protecting celebrity privacy or to prevent publication of what is deemed to be potentially libellous materials.
I think that we must remain focussed on the very important real issue which is that legislation giving unusually draconian powers to the security forces to detain people at airports, which it was argued were required to prevent imminent possible terrorist attacks, were actually used against someone who clearly has no connection to terrorism and which no member of the security forces or the UK government has ever suggested has any connection to terrorist activity.
I understand the need to give legally defined powers to the security forces to act decisively when it is suspected an imminent threat is looming but once in place the actual use of such powers must be monitored very closely in order to prevent the sort casual extension of those powers into non-terrost areas of activity. I am hoping this issue will continue to generate pressure for some sort of inquiry into who authorised the detention of the journalist’s partner using such powers as it was clearly an abuse of the system.
BTW doesn’t the image of the the two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just about sum up how out of touch and ludicrous some parts of the security system are in the face of modern communication technology. I suspect they knew it was futile and pointless but like all good career bureaucrats needed to be able to show that something, no matter how laughable, was being done.
While I agree with what you say for the most part, keep in mind that every hard drive in the office was destroyed. If that was there only office, they would have effectively been destroyed. You can’t really run a newspaper without computers any more. Who knows how long it will take that office to get back up and running.
He posted in the wrong thread. Apparently, it was too late to delete the post. He explained mistake in the other thread — not here.
in these sort of threads makes it clear; the terroris…err, I mean the governments have won.
So the world assumes NSA can crack any encryption scheme without using much resources. I call bullshit. Just PGP with huge keys and be worry free.
peteo,
“So the world assumes NSA can crack any encryption scheme without using much resources. I call bullshit. Just PGP with huge keys and be worry free.”
Where was it mentioned that the NSA was *cracking* encryption? Having backdoor access is not the same thing as cracking encryption.
Wow, people like you really exist:
http://xkcd.com/538/
This sounds like a cop-out really. There are plenty of ways to secure your private communications and it’s not even that hard. PGP/GPG comes to mind right away but there are many others.
Crazier than SCO??? Verrry debatable…
Sad to see this site close down, but tbh it served its purpose (which was originally the SCO case) and now that news is slow on the anti-free-software-lawsuit front, it’s not really needed. Hopefully when the next big case comes up another site will spring up to take its place…
Honestly does anyone really believe that anything is secure? Last I checked the Internet was started by the military, Microsoft has always had back doors in their products and the NSA has been around longer then most of us have been alive.
Shoot if I was told the NSA wasn’t spying on everyone on earth I would be pissed because my tax dollars would be going to waste! Lol.
Just kidding but for real email secure?? The very design of email is insecure!
And most Anericans have been under the impression that the NSA has super computers so good that they can calculate anything!
This just sounds like a way for the site to get some press!
There is a gulf of difference between something being secure and something being actively exploited, against the law, by the very government that is suppose to be upholding said laws. I don’t worry about someone reading the emails I send tomorrow. I worry about every single piece of electronic communication being recorded, scanned and profiled for all eternity.
EDIT: lines removed for lack of a point.
Edited 2013-08-22 02:14 UTC
The only problem with that is the person you want out (The government) is the “person” who gave you the Internet in the first place.
And if any one really thinks NSA is the only or even the worst offender is blind as a bat.
Remember yes in a lot of cases the NSA is being shown to have broken US and even international laws and that needs to be addressed, but what about the Russians? The Chinese, the Iranians the North Koreans? Who spy on their own people as public policy? If you don’t think any and probably all of them are doing as much or even more, yeah ok. Lol.
Like I said with all this going on I would be pissed if the NSA wasn’t spying like crazy, I would feel like my tax dollars are being wasted! Lol