What the government ordered Lavabit to do

Lavabit was the encrypted email service that Edward Snowden used. Thanks to a court order that revealed hitherto secret hearings, we now know what prompted Ladar Levison, the founder of the company, to close the service.

The US government ordered the company to hand over the encryption keys to not only Snowden’s account but to every one of the 400,000 people who used the service. Basically, the government wanted Lavabit to defeat its own system, by allowing the FBI to install a “pen register trap and trace device” that could monitor all the email metadata. Levison had previously complied with targeted court orders to hand over data about specific individuals but balked at giving blanket access to everyone’s accounts. [Read more…]

Meet the nominals

The rise of the religiously unaffiliated (referred to as the ‘nones’) in the US to about 20% of the population has already been widely noted and commented upon. These are people who say that they do not identify with any particular religion or religious institution or heritage, although they may not consider themselves to be atheists or agnostics.

But there is another group that has not been as closely measured and that is the group that may still belong to some religious denomination but are not committed at all to the doctrines of that institution. Such people have now also been given a label (because as a society we love giving people labels) and are called the ‘nominals’, “people who claim a religious identity but may live it in name only”. [Read more…]

The most disgusting aspect of the Affordable Care Act battle

Whatever one may think of the Affordable Care Act, there are some incontrovertible benefits that it provides. It makes health insurance affordable for the tens of millions of people (many of whom are children) who currently do not have employer-based coverage and could not get insurance on the private markets because of the high cost and/or because they had pre-existing conditions. This situation was an absolute scandal, forcing people to forego not only the peace of mind that comes with knowing that one can see a doctor or go to a hospital if needed, but also not being able to afford treatment for life-threatening illnesses. [Read more…]

More on Boehner’s dilemma

Robert Costa writes for the National Review and thus has access to Republican party insiders. He confirms and expands on what I wrote about two days ago about the dilemma facing John Boehner, who is as conservative as most of his members but is powerless as a deal maker because the tools to bribe and punish people to follow his lead are simply not there anymore. So he has become largely a follower. [Read more…]

A brutal but accurate assessment of the Republican party

Charlie Pierce does the honors:

Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one. [Read more…]