Ed Snowden's secure email provider shuts down under gag order
Found on The Register on Thursday, 08 August 2013
"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," founder Ladar Levinson said in a statement posted to the company's homepage on Thursday. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations."
"This experience," Levinson wrote, "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."
This orwellian fiasco will cost the US billions over the next years because companies are already starting to shift their services away from their spying eyes. A trend that will only increase and won't be limited to customers only, but also to developers and service providers, turning the US into an Internet wasteland. People begin to realize how much the government has overstepped their limits by justifying everything with the need to fight terrorism. Levinson decided not to give in to a gag order by closing his business. Now if everybody who received such an order would stand up and say so the government would be helpless: they cannot jail them all and ruin the economy completely.