Lavabit’s Owner Appeals Secret Surveillance Order That Led Him to Shutter Site
The owner of the encrypted email company Lavabit has formally appealed the secret surveillance order that led him to defiantly shutter the site last month. But the details of the case were immediately placed under seal in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, records show.
The Texas-based email service shut down on August 8, blaming a court battle it had been fighting, and losing, in secret. The closure occurred about a month after news reports revealed that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was using a Lavabit email account to communicate from Russia.
In a statement announcing the closure, and in subsequent interviews, Lavabit owner Ladar Levison complained that he’s prevented from revealing exactly what the government asked him to do, or who it was targeting. The circumstances suggest Lavabit had been ordered to actively circumvent its own security, either by providing the government with its private SSL certificate — allowing its users to be wiretapped — or by modifying its software to store a user’s private encryption keys.
“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levison wrote at the time. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/lavabit-appeal/?cid=social11810924
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and we call ourselves a democracy.
