Ladar Levison versus the American Police State — a Courageous Patriot

© 2013 Peter Free

 

10 October 2013

 

 

Citation — to the Ladar Levison interview

 

Democracy Now!, Lavabit: How One Company Refused to Give FBI "Unrestricted" Access to Emails of 400,000 Customers, DemocracyNow.org (07 October 2013)

 

 

Realists know that entrepreneurs are more likely to respond to money and influence, than they are to moral righteousness — but this one went the other way, at significant personal sacrifice

 

Ladar Levison is a notable patriot.  In an era in which there have been few outside the military.

 

 

Note — for more about Mr. Levison as a person

 

Tim Rogers, The Real Story of Lavabit's Founder, D Magazine (08 October 2013)

 

 

What was Lavabit — and why should we care what its founder, Ladar Levison, did?

 

From Democracy Now!:

 

 

In August, Lavabit became the first technology firm to shut down rather than disclose information to the U.S. government.

 

Lavabit owner Ladar Levison closed his encrypted email company after refusing to comply with a government effort to tap his customers’ information.

 

It has now been confirmed the FBI was targeting National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, who used Lavabit’s services.

 

But Levison says that instead of just targeting Snowden, the government effectively wanted access to the accounts of 400,000 other Lavabit customers.

 

[Levison] has been summoned before a grand jury, fined $10,000 for handing over encryption keys on paper instead of digitally, and threatened with arrest for speaking out.

 

"What they wanted was the ability, basically, to listen to every piece of information coming in and out of my network," Levison says.

 

© 2013 Democracy Now!, Lavabit: How One Company Refused to Give FBI "Unrestricted" Access to Emails of 400,000 Customers, DemocracyNow.org (07 October 2013) (paragraph split)

 

 

A more timely example of a Fourth Amendment violation you will not find

 

Amendment IV of the U.S. Constitution reads:

 

 

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

 

 

Particularized suspicion

 

Case law interpreting the Fourth Amendment never strayed much from the requirement for particularized suspicion — here, meaning the ability to go after Snowden, without endangering the privacy of everyone else on Lavabit’s servers — until after the feds decided that the phony War on Drugs and War on Terrorism required us to trash our freedoms.

 

Excessive government intrusions were aided by Congress’ cowardly passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001 and the Judiciary’s equally yellow waffling on some of its obviously un-Constitutional provisions.

 

Sadly, when you get a bunch of fleas in a bowl of fear-based delusion, the insects tend to focus on the near picture, rather than the big one.

 

Non-military America, after 9/11, has been marked more by self-indulgent fear than freedom-preserving courage.

 

 

And it gets worse — you can’t tell anyone that the FBI is sticking its nose in your business or anyone else’s

 

This is the part that is so ridiculously anti-American that Congress’ acquiescence in it (via the Patriot Act) proves our national cowardice beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

From a separate interview with Nicholas Merrill — who had once run an internet service provider called Calyx and whom the FBI had ordered to turn over many of its customer records:

 

 

Under the law, recipients of the [national security] letters are barred from telling anyone about their encounter with the FBI.

 

NICHOLAS MERRILL: It’s really important because what’s at the heart of this matter here . . . is warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of Americans without any suspicion of wrongdoing.

 

[E]ssentially the rule of law was being eroded by a combination of the Department of Justice acting without proper checks and balances overseeing what they were doing.

 

By evading the courts and by evading the court oversight and by issuing these national security letters themselves, they were able to gather huge amounts of information on Americans.

 

And then, also by putting everyone under gag orders who received them, they were able to prevent anyone from talking about what was happening.

 

AMY GOODMAN: If you even talk about getting a national security letter, you face five years in prison.

 

NICHOLAS MERRILL: Right.

 

Democracy Now!, Former Internet Provider Gagged by National Security Letter Recounts How He Was Silenced for 6 Years, DemocracyNow.org (13 August 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

 

Why Ladar Levison’s stand is important

 

Sometimes people need the benefit of a courageous example to recognize the error of their thinking.

 

If American entrepreneurs and corporations stood up to the excesses of thuggish federal power, the public might come to expect decency from its governing institutions.  And the likelihood of being bamboozled by Big Daddy’s national security fear-mongering would diminish.

 

 

The moral? — Ladar Levison deserves to be on your radar

 

He is apparently the first person of technological consequence to stand up to the hulking American police state.  Which, sadly, only serves as an indication of how far We the People have fallen in our respect for America’s freedom heritage.