A U.S. email provider can promise its users all the security and privacy it wants; it still has to do whatever it takes to give the government access.
That’s the gist of the Justice Department’s 60-page appellate brief in the Lavabit surveillance case, filed today in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.
In August of this year, Ladar Levison shut down his email service, Lavabit, in an attempt to avoid complying with a US government request for his users’ emails. To defy the US government’s gag order and shut down his service took great courage, and I believe that Ladar deserves our support in his legal defense of that decision.
At Wednesday's Inbox Love conference held at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, the founders of Lavabit and Silent Circle announced that they want to change the world of e-mail completely by putting privacy and security at its core.
At the end of July, the government filed a sealed document with a court in Virginia that sought to portray Dallas, Texas, business owner Ladar Levison as an obstruction to an investigation of a not-publicly-named-individual (that we all know to be NSA leaker Edward Snowden).
Lavabit, the encrypted email provider of choice used by Edward Snowden, spontaneously closed its doors this past summer, doing so for vague reasons related to the government, though the service’s owner was (and is) under gag order, keeping things quiet. Last month, a request to have some of the documents unsealed was submitted, which would allow amicus briefs to be filed. Such a request has been honored, revealing some information about what went down behind closed doors.
Ladar Levison took 10 years to build his company—and he's 32, so that's most of his adult life. So when he shut down his encrypted e-mail service, Lavabit, without warning last week, it was like "putting a beloved pet to sleep."
"I was faced with the choice of watching it suffer, or putting it to sleep quietly... it was very difficult," he told Democracy Now. "I had to pick between the lesser of two evils."
