In 2013, Lavabit — famous for being the privacy-oriented email service chosen by Edward Snowden to make contact with journalists while he was contracting for the NSA — shut down under mysterious, abrupt circumstances, leaving 410,000 users wondering what had just happened to their email addresses.
Ladar Levison shut down his secure email service Lavabit in 2013, when the Feds served a warrant and gag-order on him, seeking to get him to backdoor his service to let them snoop on someone. Everyone since then has known that the target of the order was Edward Snowden, but Levison faced jail time if he ever admitted it out loud, under the terms of the gag-order.
One year ago
Lavabit founder has stopped using email: "If you knew what I know, you might not use it either": Levison's lawyer, Jesse Binnall, who is based in Northern Virginia — the court district where Levison needed representation — added that it's "ridiculous" that Levison has to so carefully parse what he says about the government inquiry. — Read the rest
Writing in the Guardian, Lavabit founder Ladar Levison recounts the events that led to his decision to shutter his company in August 2013. Lavabit provided secure, private email for over 400,000 people, including Edward Snowden, and the legal process by which the FBI sought to spy on its users is a terrifying mix of Orwell — wanting to snoop on all 400,000 — and Kafka — not allowing Levison legal representation and prohibiting him from discussing the issue with anyone who might help him navigate the appropriate law. — Read the rest
Cryptoseal has shut down Cryptoseal Privacy, a VPN product advertised as a privacy tool, citing the action against Lavabit, the privacy-oriented email provider used by Edward Snowden. Court documents released in the wake of Lavabit's shut-down showed that the US government believes that it has the power to order service providers to redesign their systems to make it possible to spy on users. — Read the rest
Kevin Poulsen, Wired News: "Secure email provider Lavabit just filed the opening brief in its appeal of a court order demanding it turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site."
There's an excellent tick-tock of the Lavabit saga in the New Yorker, by Michael Phillips and Matt Buchanan. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison says he believes even if he hadn't hosted an email account for Edward Snowden, "Lavabit would eventually have found itself in the position that it's in now because it 'constitutes a gap' in the government's intelligence." — Read the rest
Ever since Lavabit, the privacy-oriented email provider used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, shut down abruptly in August, we've been wondering what, exactly, the Feds had demanded of founder Ladar Levison. As he wrote in his cryptic note, he felt that he was facing an order that would make him "complicit in crimes against the American people" but he was legally unable to say more. — Read the rest
Dave Cirilli of Rally.org says, "Lavabit founder Ladar Levison recently launched an online fundraising campaign on Rally.org to help pay for legal expenses during his his Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals fight. He's already received over 24K in donations in the last 24 hours. — Read the rest
"Attorneys for an encrypted email service provider that suddenly shut down last month amid murmurings of potential government inference have asked a federal appeals court to unseal portions of their case that are currently being kept confidential." More at RT USA.
Ars Technica interviews Ladar Levison, founder of the recently-shuttered secure-er email service. They focus on the logistics and architecture of fed snooping. Levison: "I don't know if I'm off my rocker, but 10 years ago, I think it would have been unheard of for the government to demand source code or to make a change to your source code or to demand your SSL key. — Read the rest
NBC reports that senior US Attorney James Trump sent Lavabit founder Ladar Levison and his lawyer a veiled arrest threat when Levison shut down his private email service (used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden) rather than comply with a secret order to spy on his customers. — Read the rest
Amy Goodman at Democracy Now interviewed Ladar Levison, founder/owner/operator of Lavabit, the security-focused email service Edward Snowden used to invite attendees to a Moscow press conference; the service was abruptly closed last week with an explanation pointing to US government interference. — Read the rest
Earlier this week, Xeni reported on the shutdown of Lavabit, the email provider used by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Ladar Levison, Lavabit's founder, has given an interview to Forbes about his reasoning for the shutdown, which comes — apparently — as a result of a secret NSA search-warrant complete with a gag order. — Read the rest
Silent Circle, a secure communications company founded by PGP creator Phil Zimmerman, has pre-emptively shut down its secure, encrypted email service and destroyed the servers so that it cannot be forced to reveal its customers' secrets to NSA spooks.
In a letter entitled To Our Customers that echoed (and was inspired by) yesterday's letter from Lavabit founder, Silent Circle co-founder and CTO Jon Callas explained "Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time is past" because, unlike its other products, it is theoretically possible for Silent Circle to snoop on email, and thus they may be forced to do so.
Remember when word circulated that Edward Snowden was using Lavabit, an email service that purports to provide better privacy and security for users than popular web-based free services like Gmail? Lavabit's owner has shut down the service, and posted a message on the lavabit.com — Read the rest
A footnote from this morning's dramatic airport conference convened by whistleblower-on-the-run Edward Snowden: if what Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch said is accurate, the former NSA contractor uses an email service called Lavabit. Pretty cool features list. — Read the rest
Ladar Levison — persecuted founder of the now-shuttered private mail service Lavabit, as used by Edward Snowden — has made great progress on his Darkmail project, a joint initiative with Phil "PGP" Zimmerman's also shut-down Silent Circle private email service.
The Australian attorney general has mooted a proposal to require service providers to compromise their cryptographic security in order to assist in wiretaps. The proposal is given passing mention in a senate submission from the AG's office, where it is referenced as "intelligibility orders" that would allow "law enforcement, anti-corruption and national security agencies" to secure orders under which providers like Google, Facebook and Yahoo would have to escrow their cryptographic keys with the state in order to facilitate mass surveillance. — Read the rest
In an excellent Torrentfreak feature, representatives from several prominent privacy-oriented VPN provider explain whether, and to what extent, their services are safe from NSA spying. They cover the state of crypto, the structure of their companies, and the jurisdictional and legal questions they've resolved since the news broke that Lavabit shut down because it was ordered to redesign its service to make snooping possible.
