Texas-based Lavabit service has shut down but said legal reasons prevented it explaining why.

Correspondents say Lavabit appears to have been in a legal battle to stop US officials accessing customer details.

In addition, secure communications firm Silent Circle has shut its email service because messages cannot be kept wholly secret.
Web watchers

Mr Snowden, a former contractor to the American National Security Agency (NSA), has admitted leaking information about widespread US surveillance on electronic communications to the media.

He …

Read more

Proving once again the misapplied “non-lethal” label for taser weapons, police in Miami are under severe criticism following the death of an unarmed teenage boy who was killed this week when officers made chase after he was spotted painting graffiti on an abandoned McDonald’s building.

As the Miami Herald reports:

At just 17, Israel Hernandez-Llach was already an award-winning artist, on the threshold of acclaim in Miami Beach art circles. He was a …

Read more

by Margaret Prescod

It never rains but it pours. In the last weeks, two major mobilizations against racist injustice burst out. Most people were outraged that on July 13 Zimmerman walked away from having shot teenager Trayvon Martin dead. The police did not even arrest Zimmerman until his family led a national campaign which marched and lobbied for Justice for Trayvon. And the prosecutor, according to at least one juror, did not …

Read more

In April 2012, two days before George Zimmerman was arrested for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, he huddled with a fellow neighborhood watch volunteer, Frank Taaffe. According to Taaffe, who disclosed the meeting on Fox News, Zimmerman asked him to share “several talking points” with the media. Taaffe obliged. Indeed, as Zimmerman’s legal drama unfolded over the next year and a half, Taaffe emerged as his most visible and outspoken defender. He gave …

Read more

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for …

Read more

A Louisiana parish is trying to get out of paying a 14-year-old who was repeatedly raped by her prison guard, with lawyers arguing last week that the girl wanted the sex.

The guard, Angelo Vickers, is serving a 7-year sentence after pleading guilty to molestation of a juvenile. The woman, known anonymously as Mary Doe, is now an emotionally traumatized 20-year-old. Mary Doe sued the Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Government as well as her attacker, alleging …

Read more

At nine prisons across California, more than 500 inmates continuing a hunger strike they began July 8 to protest what they call cruel and inhumane conditions, and this action — the third hunger strike in two years — must surely lead many Californians to wonder: Why should we care? What concern is it to peaceful and law-abiding citizens that people convicted of serious crimes experience deprivation? Is their fate not deserved?

We should care. Our treatment …

Read more

With a Eurozone record of 27 percent of Greeks unemployed, people are taking a pro-active approach to the crisis. Activists from the ‘We Won’t Pay’ movement, which boasts 10,000 members, are illegally reconnecting power to hundreds of homes.

Tough austerity measures have left many people in Greece unable to pay their electricity bills. The ‘We Don’t Pay’ movement which has over 10,000 members helps many of those by illegally reconnecting power to their homes, despite legal …

Read more

Following up on exclusive reporting from earlier this week about how the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency uses NSA surveillance data and tips from a secretive unit called the Special Operations Divisions (SOD) to initiate investigations, Reuters on Thursday reveals that the Internal Revenue Service was aware of and may have also used these “unconstitutional” tactics.

What’s troubling in both cases, according to legal experts, is the manner in which the agencies hide the true source of …

Read more

SEATTLE — On a narrow central Idaho highway coursing through thickets of ponderosa pines and along a winding river, members of the Nez Perce tribe made their stand.

Hundreds gathered along U.S. Highway 12 on Monday and Tuesday and formed a human blockade in an attempt to stop a controversial megaload of equipment bound for the oil tar sands of Alberta, Canada — a load reportedly weighing about 644,000 pounds and stretching over 200 feet. They …

Read more