Published time: October 11, 2013 04:04
AFP Photo / Thomas Samson
Lavabit, the secure email provider used by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, has filed its first brief in what is considered a landmark privacy case, revealing more details of its resisting an aggressive government investigation.
The email provider’s founder, Ladar Levison, shut down rather
than comply with a government order issued July 16 to release its
private SSL keys, or rather the keys to its encryption, which
would have left the service’s 40,000 users exposed as authorities
poured through data for any useful evidence on Snowden.
According to a brief filed in the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals
Levison is appealing that court order, and a government response
will be due by November 4th.
In that document Lavabit outlines its position, defending its
refusal to hand over private keys as they “were not
contraband, were not the fruits of any crime, were not used to
commit any crime, and were not evidence of any crime.”
The 44-page document argues that the pen register
statute–legislation originally focused on telephony but now
routinely used to extract electronic data–does not authorize the
US government to seize the email service’s keys, nor does the
Stored Communications Act.
Lavabit’s appeal further states that the Fourth Amendment forbids
the seizure of its SSL keys, and protects against the access of
its customers’ data.
“The Fourth Amendment insists that a warrant name particular
things to be searched; a warrant that permits open-ended
rummaging through all of Lavabit’s communications data is simply
a modern-day writ of assistance, the sort of general warrant that
the Fourth Amendment was ratified to forbid.”
The email service points out that officials forbade Lavabit from
informing anyone, including its customers and partners, that it
had compromised its security. According to the brief, government
officials “insisted that all of those parties be
affirmatively misled into believing that the system remained
secure against exactly the kind of secret monitoring that the
government was proposing.”
Interestingly, Lavabit also details that it had proposed a
compromise in turning over the target’s (in this case almost
certainly Edward Snowden) “login and subsequent logout date
and time, the IP address used to connect” along with what it
describes as “non-content headers” from any future
emails sent or received by the subject’s account.
That offer was refused, as authorities instead demanded that they
be given “real time” access to their target customer’s
data.
Lavabit’s offer does, however, seem to undermine the notion that
officials would have required access to all of the email client’s
data to sift through and determine which portion was pertinent to
its investigation.
Copyright: RT