"Lavabit, the security-conscious email provider that was the
preferred email service of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, has closed its
doors, citing US government interference. ... Under current US law,
requests for information by US intelligence agencies often carry a
gag order that forbids the party receiving the request from
disclosing what information was requested, or even that a request
was made at all. The gag orders can be challenged by appealing to
the shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which
operates in complete secrecy, but such appeals are seldom granted."
(08/08/13)
By
Neil McAllister,
8th August 2013
Lavabit, the security-conscious email provider that was the
preferred email service of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, has closed
its doors, citing US government interference.
"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become
complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away
from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,"
founder Ladar Levinson said in a statement posted to the
company's
homepage on Thursday. "After significant soul searching, I
have decided to suspend operations."
Prior to its closure, Lavabit was a dedicated email service
that offered subscribers "the freedom of running your own email
server – without the hassle or expense."
In addition to a variety of flexible configuration options,
the service boasted that all email stored on its servers was
encrypted using asymmetric elliptical curve cryptography, in
such a way that it was impossible to discern the contents of any
email without knowing the user's password.
As a
whitepaper posted to the company's website (now removed, but
available from the Internet Archive) observed:
Our goal was to make invading a user's privacy difficult,
by protecting messages at their most vulnerable point. That
doesn't mean a dedicated attacker, like the United States
government, couldn't intercept the message in transit or
once it reaches your computer.
Our hope is the difficulty associated with those
strategies means they will only be used by governments on
terrorists and scammers, not on honest citizens.
It now seems, however, that Levinson's hope was just wishful
thinking. Without going into details, his statement on Thursday
made plain that pressure from the US government was behind his
decision to shutter Lavabit.
"I feel you deserve to know what's going on – the first
amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out
in situations like this," Levinson wrote. "Unfortunately,
Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently
stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks,
even though I have twice made the appropriate requests."
Under current US law, requests for information by US
intelligence agencies often carry a gag order that forbids the
party receiving the request from disclosing what information was
requested, or even that a request was made at all.
The gag orders can be challenged by appealing to the shadowy
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which operates
in complete secrecy, but such appeals are seldom granted.
Not even Google or Microsoft – each of which, it must be
said, has far deeper pockets than Lavabit – has managed to
challenge the surveillance orders. Both companies were named by
Snowden as having turned over user data to government spies
under the secretive
PRISM program, but the FISC
won't allow them to reveal to the public what they may or
may not have actually disclosed.
Little wonder, then, that Levinson's "appropriate requests"
have similarly been denied.
The Lavabit founder says he next plans to challenge the
government's ruling in the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A
favorable ruling, he says, would allow him to "resurrect Lavabit
as an American company" – though he doesn't appear to hold out
much hope.
"This experience," Levinson wrote, "has taught me one very
important lesson: without congressional action or a strong
judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against
anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical
ties to the United States."
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/08/lavabit_shuts_down/