Privacy-first ISP raising money for online services that can't and won't fink you out to spy agencies

Cory Doctorow 7:50 am Thu Apr 12, 2012

Jon sez, "Nicholas Merrill, who previously first challenged the expansion of the National Secret Letter in the Patriot Act, is working on building a ISP infrastructure based on privacy. Help him raise funds on IndieGogo." Here's Declan McCullagh on CNet:

"The idea that we are working on is to not be capable of complying" with requests from the FBI for stored e-mail and similar demands, Merrill says.

A 1994 federal law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act was highly controversial when it was enacted because it required telecommunications carriers to configure their networks for easy wiretappability by the FBI. But even CALEA says that ISPs "shall not be responsible for decrypting" communications if they don't possess "the information necessary to decrypt."

Translation: make sure your customers own their data and only they can decrypt it.

Merrill has formed an advisory board with members including Sascha Meinrath from the New America Foundation; former NSA technical director Brian Snow; and Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project.

Merrill's looking to raise $1M on IndieGogo; he got his first $28,000 overnight, and has 64 days to go. I just kicked in a hundred bucks.

This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.

(Thanks, Jon!)

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