Privacy in the Internet age

If you thought email privacy or lack of it didn't relate to you, I recommend you read this article from Groklaw called Forced disclosure. 
Groklaw is an award winning information service for lawyers which is closing down.  I'm not a lawyer so you might think a law information service would hardly touch my life, but it does because it informs others whom I trust to inform me.

Groklaw is closing following the demise of Lavabit which was a small email service that shut its doors and is stuck in a legal battle with the US Government. The Lavabit owner, like others in  USA required to comply with a requests for information, cannot tell his own wife about the request, let alone any employees. They would have lost their jobs without knowing why a flourishing business was suddenly being shut down. It is so Kafkaesque that you'd think it impossible, but it is possible and it is happening.  US citizens and many of the rest of us are suddenly becoming aware that they/we live in a State that is transforming itself into East Germany. It is no accident that the Germans are the most upset about the routine privacy breaches we learned about in the documents released by Snowden .... they know the consequences better than most.

Read this article - it is worth it.

PS. As I type the labels 'privacy USA Snowden Groklaw Lavabit' into blogger it occurs to me that this post might make me a suspect worthy of watching ... and by logging on to this post, you might have made yourself a worthy candidate for watching too. See, its working .... in a surveillance state people become paranoid. So they self censor.  One way to counteract this over-surveilling state is to use these words a lot, discuss this a lot, link to posts like this and send emails with surveillance trigger words to clog the system. My admiration for Snowden increases the more I think about it.

(The image above comes from the website  www.hoax-slayer.com)