{"id":57844,"date":"2013-08-11T06:56:45","date_gmt":"2013-08-11T05:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/truthdigger-of-the-week-lavabits-ladar-levison\/57844\/"},"modified":"2013-08-11T06:56:45","modified_gmt":"2013-08-11T05:56:45","slug":"truthdigger-of-the-week-lavabits-ladar-levison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/truthdigger-of-the-week-lavabits-ladar-levison\/","title":{"rendered":"Truthdigger of the Week: Lavabit\u2019s Ladar Levison"},"content":{"rendered":"
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http:\/\/www.truthdig.com\/report\/item\/truthdigger_of_the_week_lavabits_ladar_levison_20130810\/<\/a><\/h6>\n

Posted on Aug\u00a010,\u00a02013<\/h4>\n
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By Alexander Reed Kelly<\/p>\n

Americans love an underdog. So they should be cheering Ladar Levison, a 32-year-old digital security specialist who closed the email service he operated for 10 years rather than help the U.S. government spy on his customers.<\/p>\n

Until Thursday afternoon, Levison was the owner and operator of Lavabit, a secure email service developed by a group of programmers in Texas in 2004 that used encryption technology to prevent the content of its users\u2019 emails from being read by anyone who didn\u2019t possess the numerical \u201ckeys\u201d required to \u201cunlock\u201d them. Levison\u2019s decision appears to be unprecedented. Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted<\/a> by The Guardian as saying: \u201cI am unaware of any situation in which a service provider chose to shut down rather than comply with a court order they felt violated the constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n

No amount of encryption can completely protect online activity from determined snoopers, but Lavabit\u2019s methods appear to have been among the most sound and reliable available to people desiring to communicate privately online. In an article about certain consequences of Lavabit\u2019s shutdown, New Statesman technology reporter Alex Hern asserted<\/a> that \u201cbased on everything we know about the intelligence services, even they can\u2019t break that sort of encryption. If they don\u2019t have the key, they don\u2019t have the data.\u201d<\/p>\n

As if the availability of that kind of power wasn\u2019t enough to attract official attention, the service became a focus of the U.S. government when it came out that NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden was likely using it to talk with people across the globe out of earshot of the authorities. Snowden apparently<\/a> used the non-secretive email address edsnowden@lavabit.com to invite journalists and human rights activists to a news conference in the international zone of Moscow\u2019s Sheremetyevo airport, where he was sequestered for more than a month.<\/p>\n

If Snowden did indeed use Lavabit, he would not have been alone. According<\/a> to the independent news site mathaba, Lavabit had 40,000 people logging in every day and sending 1.4 million messages per week. The Guardian says<\/a> the service claimed 350,000 customers. Reports that Snowden used the site appeared to cause the number of people signing up to triple in recent weeks.<\/p>\n

Levison\u2019s parting message to his customers and the broader public, published to Lavabit\u2019s page immediately after the shutdown, reads like an anxious hero\u2019s cry against the advances of an overwhelming villain.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Fellow Users,\u201d he begins<\/a>, in a fittingly non-hierarchical fashion. \u201cI 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. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what\u2019s going on\u2013the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s going to happen now?\u201d he continues. \u201cWe\u2019ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me to resurrect Lavabit as an American company.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis experience has taught me one very important lesson,\u201d Levison concludes. He has a warning for everyone using conventional tools and services to communicate online: \u201cWithout 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.\u201d The warning echoes a grimmer comment attributed to him on mathaba: \u201cI\u2019m taking a break from email,\u201d Levison reportedly said<\/a>. \u201cIf you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lavabit is not the only casualty of the government\u2019s aggressive pursuit of encryption services. Hours after Lavabit announced its shutdown, another company that offered email encryption, Silent Circle, said it was pre-emptively shutting down its service. <\/p>\n

Levison is not a privacy absolutist. When it\u2019s made available to everyone, encryption technology can be used by criminals too. \u201cHe has cooperated in the past with government investigations,\u201d mathaba reports. \u201cHe says he\u2019s received \u2018two dozen\u2019 requests over the last ten years, and in cases where he had information, he would turn over what he had.\u201d<\/p>\n

Levison says he does not intend to support criminality. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to protect people from law enforcement,\u201d he said. \u201cIf information is unencrypted and law enforcement has a court order, I hand it over.\u201d But the secretive way the government goes about collecting information, which Americans know much about after months of revelations concerning the White House and the National Security Agency\u2019s massive dragnet spying program, does disturb him. \u201cThe methods being used to conduct those investigations should not be secret,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Levison is currently raising money for a legal battle in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. As of Saturday morning, a defense fund being raised by private donors was reaching $90,000. He says he will revive Lavabit only if he can secure legal protections for services like his. \u201cIt needs to be clear that the government can\u2019t do what they\u2019re trying to do,\u201d he said. \u201cOtherwise the same request is going to come right back at us. Other big names aren\u2019t able to shut down in protest. I\u2019m one person without a bunch of employees to support. If we win, we win for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Obama administration is using all of its vast, publicly funded resources to wage a war on Americans\u2019 privacy and the freedom of thought that privacy enables, those words are exciting. Levison is a David facing a modern Goliath. His victory is not assured, but his determination to stand up for some of the United States\u2019 founding principles, at a time when such a move is becoming increasingly dangerous, is inspiring. For sticking his neck out for all of us, we honor Ladar Levison as our Truthdigger of the Week.\n<\/p>\n

*n3wjack’s world in pixels<\/a> (CC BY-SA 2.0)<\/a><\/p>\n

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Republished from: TruthDig<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.truthdig.com\/report\/item\/truthdigger_of_the_week_lavabits_ladar_levison_20130810\/ Posted on Aug\u00a010,\u00a02013 By Alexander Reed Kelly Americans love an underdog. So they should be cheering Ladar Levison, a 32-year-old digital security specialist who closed the email service he operated for 10 years rather than help the U.S. government spy on his customers. Until Thursday afternoon, Levison was the owner and operator of Lavabit, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-57844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}