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Twister: Decentralized Twitter Alternative Built with Code from Bitcoin/BitTorrent, Lavabit Encryption Scheme, No IP Recording

Lavabit owner eyes legal precedent to rid cloud-data companies of govt surveillance

Published time: August 22, 2013 05:20

Letter posted by Lavabit LLC owner Ladar Levison.(Reuters / Lavabit.com)

Download video (57.71 MB)

The owner of the now-shuttered encrypted email service used by Edward Snowden told RT that he will continue to defend online security free of government surveillance, hopefully with success in courts or a possible move of his company overseas.

The owner of the now-shuttered encrypted email service used by Edward Snowden told RT he will continue to defend online security to ensure freedom from government surveillance, hopefully with success in courts or a possible move of his company overseas. 

Ladar Levison abruptly shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, on August 8 to avoid being forced to hand over customers’ personal information and communications. 

“I’m going to keep standing on my soapbox and shouting as loudly as I can for as long as people will listen. My biggest fear when I shut down the service was that nobody would notice, nobody would care and my biggest hope was that when I shut down the service it would lead to some positive change. I’m going to continue fighting for a strong precedent via the court system and I’m going to continue to lobby Congress for change in the laws,” he said.

Levison was issued a secret federal court order that he is legally barred from detailing, though experts believe the order to be a sealed subpoena or national security letter which demands he cooperate with an investigation related to Snowden.

Levison told RT he fears a bleak future for secure-data services like Lavabit should US government surveillance and strong-arming of American companies continue.

“It’s become clear to me over last couple of months that all of the major providers here in the US have provided our government with real-time access to private information of their user,” he said. “They don’t really have a choice about it and they don’t really have the ability to tell anybody about it. Fact is, if you trust your data to a company , even if they haven’t already been approached and been required to provide access, the simple fact is they could be in the future, unless that judicial precedent is set or Congress takes action.”

Levison said he hopes his case can help set such a legal precedent. In the meantime, he is entertaining the possibility of moving his service overseas, though he is not yet confident such an arrangement could achieve security for his customers free of US spying.

“As an American, if I were to continue running the service even if it was physically based in another country, I could still be required to compromise the security of that system and I could literally be put in a position where I’m forced to choose between breaking the laws of the country in which the service is hosted or breaking the laws of the United States,” he said.

Levison said last week he believes he could face criminal charges for refusing to comply with the secret order.

He said he thinks the American public has a right to know what the government’s doing and how it’s collecting information on its own citizens.

“If I had continued to operate, I felt like it would have put me in an ethically-compromising position,” he said about his service, which he believed would no longer have been a secure, private method of communication for Americans had he continued.

Levison said he doesn’t oppose keeping an investigation secret, but he does object to the covert methods the government uses to conduct surveillance. Therefore, he felt he had no choice but to protect his customers even though the previous month, following the revelations that spawned from Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency spying programs to The Guardian and Washington Post reporters, was Lavabit’s best in its 10-year history.

“When you say no to the government, they have the ability to take everything,” he said of defying the government by continuing Lavabit and not complying with the order. “They have the ability to take your business, take your money and take your freedom. And there really isn’t all that much you can do about it. I was looking at the very real possibility of an impossible debt and possibly being put in jail and still not being able to tell people why I was even in jail.”

RT – USA

Lavabit owner eyes legal precedent to rid cloud-data companies of govt surveillance

Feds Threaten To Arrest Lavabit Founder For Shutting Down His Service

Posted on August 18, 2013 by # 1 NWO Hatr

Tech Dirt -by Mike Masnick

from the either-you-help-us-spy-on-people-or-you’re-a-criminal dept

The saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order. The feds are apparently arguing that the act of shutting down the business, itself, was a violation of the order:  

… a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison’s lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered — stating that Levison may have “violated the court order,” a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.

That same article suggests that the decision to shut down Lavabit was over something much bigger than just looking at one individual’s information — since it appears that Lavabit has cooperated in the past on such cases. Instead, the suggestion now is that the government was seeking a tap on all accounts:

Levison stressed that he has complied with “upwards of two dozen court orders” for information in the past that were targeted at “specific users” and that “I never had a problem with that.” But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service. He likened the demands to a requirement to install a tap on his telephone.

It sounds like the feds were asking for a full on backdoor on the system, not unlike some previous reports of ISPs who have received surprise visits from the NSA.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130816/14533924213/feds-threaten-to-arrest-lavabit-founder-shutting-down-his-service.shtml

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Feds Threaten To Arrest Lavabit Founder For Shutting Down His Service

Lavabit owner fears arrest for non-compliance after secret surveillance order

RT
August 17, 2013

The owner of the encrypted email service used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden says he could face criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret federal court order issued last week.

Ladar Levison abruptly shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, last week to avoid being forced to hand over customers’ personal information and communications.

James Trump, a senior litigation counsel at the US attorney’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, contacted Levinson’s lawyer on August 8 – the day Levinson ended Lavabit’s services, NBC News reported. The attorney was told that Levison had “violated the court order,” leading to speculation that he may be charged with contempt of court.

“I would love to tell you everything that’s happened to me over the last six weeks. I’m just legally prevented from doing so,” Levison recently told RT. He is legally barred from speaking publicly about the legal order, which is believed to be a sealed subpoena or national security letter which demands that he cooperate with an investigation related to Snowden.

In a note to customers and supporters upon shutting down Lavabit, Levison wrote on the company’s website, “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.”

Levison plans to challenge the secret order in a federal appeals court. He told NBC that he has been“threatened with arrest multiple times over the past six weeks.”

He stated that he has complied with court orders for information on targeted customers in the past, but insists the latest order is vastly different in scope and scale.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“I think the amount of information that they’re collecting on people that they have no right to collect information on is the most alarming thing,” he told RT. “I mean, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to guarantee that our government will only conduct surveillance on people in which it has a probable suspicion or evidence that they are committing some crime, and that that evidence has been reviewed by a judge and signed off by a judge before that surveillance begins. And if there’s anything alarming, it’s that now that’s all being done after the fact. Everything’s being recorded, and then a judge can after the fact say it’s okay to go look at the information.”

Following Levison’s move to shutter Lavabit, encrypted internet service provider Silent Circle has followed suit. Other encryption services have suggested that they would do the same if put in a similar position by the US government.

Riseup email service issued a statement saying, “We would rather pull the plug than submit to repressive surveillance by our government, or any government.”

Encrypted chat client Cryptocat stated, “If we receive a surveillance or backdoor order that we are unable to legally fight, we will shut down Cryptocat rather than implement it.”

Levison began a legal defense fund which raised over $ 40,000 within hours of Lavabit’s shutdown. That number had jumped to $ 100,000 by the next day, Levison told RT.

Related posts:

1. Snowden’s Email Provider Shuts Down


2. Kafka’s America: Secret Courts, Secret Laws, and Total Surveillance


3. U.S. Government Obtains Secret Court Order for Email Data of WikiLeaks Volunteer


4. FISA Approves EVERY Secret Surveillance Warrant in 2011: Report


5. Covert surveillance program in NY hospitals uses hand-washing compliance excuse to spy on workers

This article was posted: Saturday, August 17, 2013 at 4:55 am

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Prison Planet.com

Lavabit owner fears arrest for non-compliance after secret surveillance order