Protecting Constitutional Rights and Civil Liberties Can Cost You Dearly In America Just ask Lavabit Email Service
Protecting the constitutional rights of your customers could land you in prison for contempt of court, cost you a hefty fine or even cost you your business just as it did Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit email service provider, who refused to bend over for the Feds when he was ordered to give them access to his email servers. They were wanting this access of course because Lavabit was Edward Snowden’s email service provider. Lavabit’s primary purpose as an email service is to provide more privacy protection than a typical service and so the government demanding access was completely antithetical to it’s purpose. Do we not have some reasonable expectation of privacy, especially when that’s what we thought we were purchasing with such a service? And don’t people have a right to provide such a service? I think most people would naturally assume that to be the case but they’d be wrong.
Back in September Mr. Levison decided to shut down his email service rather than giving in to the pressure of the Federal Government to sell out his customers privacy to the United States Government.
“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levison wrote at the time. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.”
He says something very telling in the video below that is worth expounding upon, about how the government is able to, basically, persecute people like him and their companies, without the knowledge of the people because they simply declare anything having to do with the “case” as “classified” so they can act with complete impunity and disregard to the Constitution and people’s civil liberties and nobody is the wiser. That’s the governments latest tactic for taking away freedom of speech. Just say it’s a secret and threaten to put anyone who talks to the media about it in prison and throw away the key. Obviously they know there would be outrage if everyone knew about such things and the media actually did their jobs and reported it. That’s how the government continues to operate in an unlawful manner, persecuting companies like Lavabit email service and getting away with it. They can literally get away with murder by just saying “It’s Classified”.
It’s time to put a stop to this out of control government but it’s a difficult proposition because we have so very little true representation, within government today, of the people. We need to be vigilant to share these kinds of stories with as many people as we can and support people like Ladar Levison and Lavabit email service when they take a stand against a tyrannical, out of control government.
I found this story on libertyblitzkrieg.com in case you’d like to check it out there.
If you want to support Mr. Levison in is fight against these unlawful acts against him and his company you can
go HERE