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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced that Cloudflare is one of its clients in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of National Security Letters:
We're happy to be able to announce that Cloudflare is the second courageous client in EFF's long-running lawsuit challenging the government's unconstitutional national security letter (NSL) authority. Cloudflare, a provider of web performance and security services, just published its new transparency report announcing it has been fighting the NSL statute since 2013.
Like EFF's other client, CREDO, Cloudflare took a stand against the FBI's use of unilateral, perpetual NSL gag orders that resulted in a secret court battle stretching several years and counting. The litigation—seeking a ruling that the NSL power is unconstitutional—continues, but we're pleased that we can at long last publicly applaud Cloudflare for fighting on behalf of its customers. Now more than ever we need the technology community to stand with users in the courts. We hope others will follow Cloudflare's example.
16-16082 Notice to Court Concerning NSL
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday January 13 2017, @02:40PM
I'm glad I simply misread your tone (tone? on the internet?). I'm even gladder to read such great commentary.
You're absolutely right that there has to be an effort to prevent terrorism before it happens. To do that, law enforcement needs to be able to track when somebody has been scoping out a target, buying materiel, and organizing.
The use of NSL, and really all expansion of cyber law enforcement, is based on the premise that the problem is people having too much privacy. I say that this premise itself is faulty. Look at what has changed since before computers. People always had privacy. What changed was the amount of power we have within our own homes. The internet gives us a safe space to organize with random people, as opposed to the physical world where meeting places or routes to them are at least visible to random passersby who are part of the same community. The internet gives us a more anonymous means of buying dangerous things, as opposed to the physical world where people see what you're buying. Mail and phone orders have existed as well, but the cost barriers to running such a business kept those businesses within the scope of reasonable government surveillance. For anybody to effectively surveil all commerce on the internet, they would need to cast a net so wide as to eliminate privacy altogether.
But what has changed most strongly is the dissemination of memes. I'm not talking cat pictures necessarily. I'm talking the original concept of "meme" as an "imitated thing" that passes through society like genes pass through populations. These days, mentally deranged anarchists have as much of a voice as happy, stable community leaders. This influences the ideas that can percolate through society.
If we truly want to stop terrorism before it happens, we need to stop the ideas that lead people to abandon all hope in society. We need, firstly, to make society obviously worth being a part of for everyone. We need, secondly, to privilege the voices of people that will help resolve personal difficulties, and hinder the voices of people that will use your personal difficulties to incite hatred, fear, and violence. And we need, thirdly and most importantly, to do all of this in a decentralized manner that won't end up giving any group of people a control console over the thoughts and emotions of anyone else.
The alternative, which is now the primary means of preventing terrorism, is to cast an ever-widening net of surveillance, feeding into an ever-growing body of unfathomable data about our lives, interpreted by an ever-more-powerful group of secret police, resulting in an ever-more-inescapable totalitarian society.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?