Marcy rounds up what is known about the Lavabit demand that convinced the owner to shut down. NBC adds the owner was threatened with arrest for doing it.

This seems to lead us to the probability that the government wanted to put a sniffer on the Lavabit server to hoover up everything, and Ladar Levison, the owner, felt that was just too much, and involved customers who weren’t accused of anything. Going along with the order would make a mockery of his agreement with his customers which would destroy his business.

Mr Levison said he has complied in the past with court orders concerning individual customers, something that is probably covered by his TOS, i.e. nothing illegal, but this was obviously an attempt to take everything, and Levison just didn’t feel it was right or proper.

It is very telling that an individual small business owner has a stronger sense of right and wrong than huge corporations with lawyers on staff, and more cash than the Treasury.

Charlie Stross puts forth a theory in his post, Snowden leaks: the real take-home, that is worth a look.

He is British so the language might be tricky if you aren’t used to reading it, but I personally find the basic hypothesis interesting: Generation Y has no innate understanding of loyalty to its employers because employers no longer have any loyalty to their workers. Essentially Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher created Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.

As a Boomer I saw the process that Stross is talking about and watched it happen. In the military my Father had a better retirement package than was offered to me, and my package was overwhelmingly better than what anyone gets in today’s military.

WalMart was actually a pretty good job, when Sam Walton ran the company, but that died with him, as it died in almost all companies. Workers were no longer guaranteed anything more than a paycheck, so there was no reason to hang around, because you moved up by going somewhere else to work.

Using contractors for intel is insane, plain and simple. Contract employees have no incentive to stay around, and no more reason to honor a contract than that of the company that wrote it. Loyalty is a two-way street, and as the Boomers leave the workforce, the people who will replace them have no illusions about loyalty to their job.

Position: 20.7N 37.7W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West-Northwest [290°] near 12 mph [19 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [ 55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1008 mb ↑.

Currently about 955 miles [1535 km] West-Northwest of the Cape Verde Islands.

Erin is a minimal tropical storm that is currently forecast to head into the central Atlantic and fade out over cooler water next week.

At 10PM CDT Erin has again lost power and become a tropical depression.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]