Snowdon is a dummy

It is clear why those took me. It's because I'm Glenn's partner. Because I went to Berlin. Because Laura lives there. So they think I have a big connection," he said. "But I don't have a role. I don't look at documents. I don't even know if it was documents that I was carrying. It could have been for the movie that Laura is working on."

That sort of seems an unprincipled stance to take. Are the British police (or whoever) allowed to just order a newspaper to destroy hardware?

• Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, has said that 10 Downing Street was involved in the attempt by Whitehall officials to get the Guardian to destroy or surrender the secret material it obtained from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden. In interviews (see 2.10pm), he did not name those involved, but Downing Street sources have said that David Cameron himself approved an attempt to get the Guardian to hand over its material. They argue that it would have been irresponsible to allow the Guardian to keep such material on computers where they could have been hacked by enemies or terrorists.

The Conservative MP Mark Pritchard made this argument on the World at One.

The question I would have put to the Guardian is how confident are they in their own IT systems that their systems are not being hacked by serious organised crime who may exchange this material to terrorists for other things.

Crazy times, indeed.

Yes I know, but yesterday she was described as US film maker staying in Berlin.

A few months ago, after the NSA spying stories first broke, we wrote about a bit from This American Life where the host, Ira Glass, was interviewing lawyers for prisoners detained at Guantanamo, about the impact of knowing that the government was listening in on every single phone call you made. The responses were chilling. The people talked about how it stopped them from being emotional with their children or other close friends and relatives. How they had trouble functioning in ways that many people take for granted, just because the mental stress of knowing that you have absolutely no privacy is incredibly burdensome. PJ, the dynamo behind Groklaw, has written a powerful piece announcing explaining the similar feeling she's getting from all the revelations about government surveillance, in particularly the shutting down of Lavabit by Ladar Levison, and his suggestion that if people knew what he knew about email, they wouldn't use it.

Because of this, she's shutting down Groklaw.

You really need to read the entire piece, but it clearly lays out the sort of mental anguish that you get with the realization that what you thought was private and personal, might not be any more. She compares it to the feeling of having her apartment robbed, and the creepy feeling you get that some stranger was riffing through all of your personal belongings. And, from there, she riffs on the importance of privacy and intimacy, and how the totalitarian state takes those things away, quoting a powerful passage from Janna Malamud Smith's book Private Matters. You should go read the full quotes, but it notes the psychological impact of not having privacy.

And that's how PJ feels right now. The fact that the NSA is collecting all emails in or out of the US, as well as all encrypted messages, means that it's impossible to have that privacy and intimacy that she feels is necessary to run the site:
There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel.

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.
What amazes me in all of these discussions concerning the defenders of such surveillance is that they never even seem able to comprehend the psychological impact of what all of this does. The way people change their behavior when they're being watched constantly, and what that can do to a person.

The fallout from all of this NSA surveillance will take a very, very long time to measure, but it will be profound. The government, again, has put so much emphasis on the "benefit" of preventing an exceptionally low probability event, that it barely even considers the massive costs on everyone else. PJ is shutting down Groklaw because of the same reasons as Lavabit shut down. But it is the same root cause. The power of a surveillance state to spin out of control has wide-reaching consequences. It's difficult to see how anyone can claim it's worth the costs.
My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I've always been a private person. That's why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours.

Oddly, if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the world's economy would collapse, I suppose. I can't really hope for that. But for me, the Internet is over.

So this is the last Groklaw article. I won't turn on comments. Thank you for all you've done. I will never forget you and our work together. I hope you'll remember me too. I'm sorry I can't overcome these feelings, but I yam what I yam, and I tried, but I can't.
I find this deeply upsetting on many levels, not the least of which is that Groklaw is a needless casualty in a stupid power struggle among weak-minded, power hungry government officials who don't even seem to comprehend what a mess they've created.

• David Davis, the Conservative MP, has strongly rejected the Home Office's claim that Miranda's detention was justified. This is what Davis told the World at One.

The sorts of words we’ve been hearing coming back actually rather remind me of when the current policy minister, Damian Green, was arrested by the police. They used like “proportionate” and “within the law” and such things then. It wasn’t true then and I don’t think it’s true now.

It fails logic 101. We’re used to this response from the Home Office – ‘if you’re not on our side you’re on the side of the terrorists’ is what they’re trying to say. It fails logic 101. If they suspected there was information, unique information carried by Mr Miranda that they could intercept and take away and therefore prevent it coming into the hands of terrorists, then you could understand that, although even then section 7 was not designed for that and doesn’t actually allow that.

But even if that were the case, then you could understand it, one might be rather forgiving it,. But this is information at best which is held in America, probably held in Germany as well, held in many places on many electronic formats, and so taking it away wouldn’t actually stop it going anywhere else anyway.

Quote:

12.00pm BST
Here's the Home Office statement in full.

The government and the police have a duty to protect the public and our national security. If the police believe that an individual is in possession of highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism, then they should act and the law provides them with a framework to do that. Those who oppose this sort of action need to think about what they are condoning.

This is an ongoing police inquiry so will not comment on the specifics.

Translated, what that seems to mean is: David Miranda was carrying leaked secret information that would have been useful to terrorists.

Groklaw shutting down...

And the people opposing these actions ought really to put more thought into what they are opposing.

It fails logic 101. We’re used to this response from the Home Office – ‘if you’re not on our side you’re on the side of the terrorists’ is what they’re trying to say. It fails logic 101.

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.

Frank Apisa wrote:

And the people opposing these actions ought really to put more thought into what they are opposing.

David Davis, the Conservative MP wrote:

It fails logic 101. We’re used to this response from the Home Office – ‘if you’re not on our side you’re on the side of the terrorists’ is what they’re trying to say. It fails logic 101.

That comment from David Davis fails logic! It doesn't say anything of the sort...and does not even infer that.