Friday, August 09, 2013

Tech community takes another hit under Barack

Two e-mail providers are no more today.  The US government which is supposed to encourage business is instead killing it.

Neil McAllister (Register) notes NSA whistle-blower Ed Snowden had used the e-mail provider Lavabit and that, among its selling points: "the service boasted that all email stored on its servers was encrypted using asymmetric elliptical curve cryptography, in such a way that it was impossible to discern the contents of any email without knowing the user's password."  Reuters quotes from a letter written by Lavabit owner Ladar Levison that was posted to the Lavabit site yesterday, "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit."

The letter continues, "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

Barack Obama: Bad for the economy, bad for business.  That becomes ever more clear with every day.  Ted Samson (InfoWorld) observes:

 Lavabit's move represents another black eye for the U.S.-based tech companies, many of which have struggled to protect their reputations in the wake of the revelations about the federal government's far-reaching surveillance programs. Foreign leaders have seized the opportunity to steer their citizens away from America-based services. Meanwhile, a recent report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation predicted that U.S.-based cloud companies stand to lose as much as $35 billion over the next three years, due to customer wariness of Prism and other spying programs.
Levison himself wrote that he would "strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."


John Constine (TechCrunch) adds:

 The move has bolstered critics who are becoming increasingly vocal about how the U.S. government’s surveillance efforts are jeopardizing American technology businesses. They fear international customers may take their cloud business elsewhere in an attempt to avoid the NSA. Jennifer Granick, the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote that ”the U.S. government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive industry. Lavabit may just be the canary in the coal mine.”


Now Silent Mail is following Lavabit's lead.  In a message posted to its website, the company notes it will continue to provide texting and phone services but the e-mail service is discontinued:

 We’ve been thinking about this for some time, whether it was a good idea at all. Today, another secure email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system lest they “be complicit in crimes against the American people.” We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.
We’ve been debating this for weeks, and had changes planned starting next Monday. We’d considered phasing the service out, continuing service for existing customers, and a variety of other things up until today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your safety we decided that the worst decision is always no decision.
Silent Phone and Silent Text, along with their cousin Silent Eyes are end-to-end secure. We don’t have the encrypted data and we don’t collect metadata about your conversations. They’re continuing as they have been. We are still working on innovative ways to do truly secure communications. Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time is past.


Other countries (such as Australia) will move forward and make advances and money.  But Barack has retarded the growth of the tech world in the US.  There is nothing he touches, apparently, that he doesn't destroy.  He is a failure at job creation, he is a failure at business growth.

Must be his Cold War thinking.




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