Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

Pamela Jones shuts award-winning site, saying concerns that messages could be read mean that 'there is now no shield from forced exposure'


Charles Arthur
The Guardian, Tuesday 20 August 2013

The award-winning legal analysis site Groklaw is shutting because its founder says that "there is no way" to continue to run it without using secure email - and that the threat of NSA spying means that could be compromised.

"There is now no shield from forced exposure," writes the site's founder, Pamela Jones, an American paralegal who has run the site from its start in 2003, in a farewell message on the site.

Jones cites the revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) can capture any email, and can store encrypted email for up to five years, as having prompted her decision to shutter the site: "the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpont of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don't know how to do Groklaw like this," she writes.

The abrupt decision - which Jones had not hinted at in any previous article since the revelations about the extent of the NSA's surveillance first came out in June - shocked people.

Privacy International criticised the climate that had led to Jones's decision. "The closing of Groklaw demonstrates how central the right to privacy is to free expression. The mere threat of surveillance is enough to [make people] self-censor", it said in a statement.

"Andrea", a core developer on the Tor project - which provides anonymous communication online - said on Twitter: "This is exactly how it begins - chilling effects accumulate until the few who still speak out are easy targets."

Jones cited the warning from the founder of the Lavabit encrypted email service, who earlier this month closed it down rather than comply with an NSA order, as being a key part of her decision. "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."

Groklaw relied in some cases on email tips from readers and other anonymous sources. Its name was meant to indicate that it would help people to "grok" - understand deeply - legal issues relating to technology law topics.

Posted at 2.40am EDT on Tuesday, Jones's move comes just hours after Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed that the UK government threatened court action to force the paper to surrender material it had obtained relating to UK and US surveillance. GCHQ experts monitored the destruction of computers and hard drives in the Guardian's offices.

On Groklaw, Jones writes: "I'm not a political person, by choice, and I must say, researching the latest developments convinced me of one thing -- I am right to avoid it." She says that her reasoning about the closedown is the risk of exposure for people sending her information: "They tell us that if you send or receive an email from outside the US, it will be read. If it's encrypted, they keep it for five years, presumably in the hopes of tech advancing to be able to decrypt it against your will and without your knowledge. Groklaw has readers all over the world."

Set up in May 2003, Groklaw first came to fame through its analysis of a case involving SCO, a technology company which claimed that the free Linux operating system infringed a number of patents that it owned.

More recently, it has focussed on the multiple patent fights being fought between Samsung and Apple, and was a vociferous critic of the jury deliberations in the Apple-Samsung legal case fought in California in which Apple was awarded $1bn in damages.

The site won a number of awards for blogging and was nominated a number of times for awards by organisations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Bar Administration.

Jones confirmed the move in a tweet from the Groklaw Twitter account: "This is the last Groklaw article. Thank you for all you've done. I will never forget you and our work together."