NicholasMerrill
Latest
ISP wins 11-year battle to reveal warrantless FBI spying
A US district court has struck down an 11-year-old gag order imposed by the FBI on Nicolas Merrill, the former head of a small internet service provider. Originally issued in 2004, it forbade Merrill from revealing that he'd received a so-called national security letter (NSL), a warrantless demand for customer data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes about 300,000 such letters have been sent since the Patriot Act was enacted in 2001, but the decision signals the first time that a gag order has been lifted. "Courts cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, simply cannot accept the Government's assertions that disclosure would... create a (public) risk," said Judge Victor Marrero.
Calyx Institute to create ISP that keeps customer traffic private, away from prying governmental eyes
Wouldn't it be nice if we were free to surf the web free from fear of having our traffic monitored and emails scraped by the NSA? Well, if Nicholas Merrill has his way, we won't have to rely on anonymous browsers or proxy servers -- we'll have a new ISP built from the ground up to protect customer privacy. A non-profit, the Calyx Institute, will run the ISP that'll employ end-to-end encryption on web traffic, plus encrypted emails to prevent anyone other than the user, including the ISP itself, from seeing people's internet activity. Because of this structure, Calyx, quite literally, won't be able to comply with governmental requests to obtain customer traffic data under the Patriot or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Acts. The best part is, such online privacy may cost as little as $20 a month, and Merrill has hopes to provide a similarly secure VoIP service at some point as well. Of course, the venture will only be possible if Merrill can raise the $2 million needed to get it going -- which is why he's pitching the idea to venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and the general public through crowd-sourced funding site IndieGogo. Want to help out? Hit the source below to make a donation.
