Overflight, 98

«My service was designed to remove me from the possibility of being forced to violate the persons’ privacy. … In that surveillance would have to be conducted on the target, either the sender or the receiver of the messages. But I was approached by the FBI quite recently, and told that, because I couldn’t turn over the information from that particular user, I would be forced to give up those SSL keys and let the FBI collect every communication on my network without any kind of transparency. … Think about that. I believe in the rule of law, I believe in the need to conduct investigations, but those investigations are supposed to be difficult for a reason. It’s supposed to be difficult to invade somedody’s privacy, because of how intrusive it is, because of how disruptive it is. If we can’t, if we don’t have a right to privacy, how do we have a free and open discussion? What good is the right to free speech, if it’s not protected, in the sense that you can’t have a private discussion with somebody else about something you disagree with. Think about the chilling effect that that has. Think about the chilling effect it does have on contries that don’t have a right to privacy.» Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, at the 2013 hearings of the European Parliament to investigate NSA surveillance on EU citizens and companies
«First of all, Americans’ justification for everything since the September 11 attacks is terrorism. Everything is in the name of national security to protect our population. In reality, it’s the opposite. A lot of the documents have nothing to do with terrorism and national security, but with competition between countries, and with companies’ industrial, financial, or economic issues. Secondly, there’s XKeyscore. When we first started publishing articles, the US government’s defence was that it was not invading the content of communications, just taking the metadata. That means the names of the people talking, who is calling whom, call durations… But if I know all the people you are communicating with, and everyone they are communicating with, where you are when you are communicating, the call duration and the position, then I can learn a lot about your personality, your activity and your life. This is a major invasion of privacy.

Overflight