Groklaw closes over spy agency surveillance

Popular IT law blog Groklaw announced overnight it will cease to publish, citing mass surveillance and email interception by UK and US spy agencies.

Overnight, Groklaw founder Pamela Jones apologised for the decision to close down the blog but said it was impossible to operate without email access.

"There is no way to do Groklaw without email," Jones wrote.

Jones referred to the secure email service Lavabit, which closed earlier this month as its owner refused to participate in automated government surveillance and interception of messages, saying it was was impossible to guarantee privacy of electronic communications in the United States.

"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," Jones wrote.

Jones said her personal decision was to "get off of the internet to the degree it's possible" as a consequence of the privacy violating surveillance conducted by spy agencies.

"I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible," the Groklaw founder wrote.

She suggested that people who have to stay online move their email accounts to countries other than the United States, such as Switzerland, which have privacy laws that prevent government interception of messages.

Groklaw was founded in 2003 by Jones and rose to prominence covering industry issues such as the SCO Group's ongoing legal war against Linux and companies associated with the open source kernel project, and became a popular source on IT law opinion.

The blog was picked by the United States Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic web archive of Internet materials in 2010, under the "Legal Blawgs" section.