The shutdown came a little less than two weeks after two small e-mail providers decided to stop their services to challenge secret government surveillance.
Such public displays are far more difficult for large companies to make, and help explain why the most public efforts to challenge secret government orders have come from small companies and nonprofits.
The shutdown of two small e-mail providers on Thursday illustrates why it is so hard for Internet companies to challenge secret government surveillance: to protect their customers' data from federal authorities, the two companies essentially committed suicide.
The ACLU asserts that it has standing to sue the government over the program because it is a Verizon customer, overcoming a hurdle that has blocked previous attempts to challenge secret programs.
For example, over the past ten years, the Supreme Court has prevented any challenge to the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, relying on logic that could have been lifted straight out of Catch-22: to "properly challenge secret Government programs requires the very information the Government refuses to disclose" — in other words, nobody actually has the standing to challenge the policy.
A number of previous attempts to challenge secret government surveillance practices in court had failed because the plaintiffs lacked what's called standing: they couldn't prove that they, in particular, had been affected, and you need to do that to bring a suit.
Or the regulators will find them, breathing down their necks, challenging the secrets as being too secret, or the wrong type of secrets.
But the protesters at Occupy London released a communally authored list of demands challenging the secret practices and undemocratic privileges of the City of London Corporation, working out of a tent-city on the flagstones of St Paul's Churchyard.
Kansas State filed a lawsuit challenging a secret deal between the former athletic director Bob Krause and the ex-football coach Ron Prince that would pay Prince $3.2 million in deferred compensation between 2015 and 2020.
While they hoped the US would not oppose the Yemeni's request for freedom, they also did not expect the US to keep its reasons for the challenge secret.
