This story is getting plenty of run in the nerd and conspiracy communities. The short version is that a company running an encrypted e-mail service has shut down due to some involvement with the government. Edward Snowden reportedly used the service in his cloak and dagger work. The assumption is the Feds have forced the guy to reveal his encryption keys so they can rifle through the mail sent and received through his service.

Some people think the Feds may have tried to bully him into letting them read his traffic going forward. The owner chose to go out of business so we can assume the government made it so he had no choice or they were prepared to shut him down if he did not do something he is not free to discuss. It’s hard to know, but it is a good example of how the government is “partnering” with Silicon Valley to stifle alternatives to Big Tech.

This is not new. Way back in the olden times, there was an anonymous mail server in Finland. You did not need an account to use it and it had no logs. The way it worked is you sent the server an e-mail. The first line was the address you wanted to reach. The rest of the body was your e-mail text. The system would forward it to that e-mail and strip away all evidence of your identity.  Here’s the Wiki on it, which is mostly correct.

Even further back when encryption of internet traffic got going, the governments of the world began to freak out. The US government banned strong encryption or limited its use because they feared they could not spy on people otherwise. The United States classifies cryptographic products as munitions, believe it or not, and therefore bans the export of such technology beyond a certain strength. That’s how serious they take the subject.

Since the dawn of time, governments have wanted to prevent private conversations among the citizenry. There’s a reason why The Founders had a fetish for private association and freedom of assembly. When citizens can keep secrets from the state, they can be free. More important, when they can speak outside the ear of the ruling class, they can conspire to overthrow the ruling class. Privacy is the seed corn of revolution.

The fact is the real bad guys know how to avoid the Panopticon. They use strong encryption for electronic communications, but also deploy old fashioned techniques that are impossible to thwart. Government is always a blind giant swinging a mallet. The men and women at the NSA think they are the smartest kids on the playground, but that’s not the case. They simply have the force of the state to magnify their efforts.

That said, the giant swinging the mallet can cause a lot of damage. There’s a crazy Arab sitting in the Obama administration needed to conceal their shenanigans in Libya. On a fairly regular basis cops break into the homes of innocent people because they think they are dealing weed. Thousands of honest people are on terror lists, spending enormous sums to get their names cleared so they can get on a plane. The Giant wrecks a lot.

Now, the provider of an e-mail service is out of business because the Feds can’t force him to violate your Fourth Amendment rights. No one is going to shed a tear for this guy, because most people are either blindly patriotic or they don’t understand the issues involved in technology. There’s going to come a time though, when it becomes clear to most Americans that the partnership of Big Tech and the Deep State is very bad for us.