NSA Spying Killing Internet

The Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School wrote about anonymous-EMail providers Lavabit and Silent Circle that are choosing to close rather than turn over their client Emails to the NSA.  This is what the blog called "the canary in the coal mine", probably the first of a series of bad news for Internet freedom.

There are two sad lessons to learn from the (potentially temporary) demise of Lavabit.
First, communications service providers are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to resisting even abusive or overbroad government surveillance demands. The court processes and the reasons for surveillance are kept secret from the companies. The cases that interpret the government's powers under the law are secret. Knowledgeable counsel is hard to find… and expensive.
Yet, in a world where the FISA court has rubber stamped government collection of every phone record on everybody, where foreigners have no rights and the contents of Americans’ international communications are regularly scooped up, where the FBI is installing malware on phones and laptops, and where spies are demanding user passwords and SSL network decryption keys, complying with court process can be directly at odds with protecting your customers’ right to privacy. Some lawyers believe there is little, if anything, companies can say to successful challenge even potentially dangerous forms of surveillance. Yet, failure to comply can mean fines, or jail time, or, potentially worse, seizure of the business’ servers.
So, in the choice between complicity or death, Lavabit chose death.
Second, the fact that neither Americans nor foreigners trust the U.S. government and its NSA anymore puts the U.S. communications companies at a severe competitive disadvantage. American law provides almost no protection for foreigners, who comprise a growing majority of any global company's customers. And even though Americans receive more nominal legal protection, we now know that these legal protects haven’t stopped the NSA from wiretaps fiber optic cables inside the United States, warrantlessly gathering Americans’ emails and chats from service providers like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, collecting phone records on every American for the past seven years, or demanding that companies build, or at least maintain, surveillance backdoors in products advertised as secure from eavesdropping.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published the letter from Lavabits founder announcing they were quitting rather than turn over data to the NSA.