The FBI order was handed down on July 16, according to Wired,
shortly after Lavabit refused to bypass the company’s internal
security systems to facilitate a government request asking the
email provider to trace the internet IP address of an individual
user.
Government documents indicate that the FBI sent Lavabit a
so-called “pen register” order on June 28, forcing the
Texas-based company to record the connection information
belonging to a particular user each time that user logged in to
check his or her email. Lavabit was then required to turn that
data over to the government.
The pen register came down just weeks after the first Snowden
leaks were published in the Guardian and The Washington Post.
Among the unveiled programs was PRISM – a massive electronic data
mining program employed to collect and store communication data
extracted from internet companies including Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, and others.
While the identity of the FBI’s Lavabit target was not disclosed
in the filings, the suspect is described as having committed
violations under the Espionage Act, indicating with near
certainty that Snowden was the motivating factor.
The June 28 order, as seen by Wired, required Lavabit to turn
over all “technical assistance necessary to accomplish the
installation and use of the pen/trap device.”
When the company – which is now embroiled in a court battle with
the government – refused to comply, authorities filed a motion to
compel, saying the single user “enabled Lavabit’s encryption
services, and this Lavabit would not provide the requested
information.”
“The representative of Lavabit indicated that Lavabit had the
technical capability to decrypt the information, but that Lavabit
did not want to ‘defeat its own system,’” the order went
on.
Prosecutors soon asked that founder Ladar Levinson and Lavabit be
held in contempt “for its disobedience and resistance to these
lawful orders.” A search warrant was issued demanding “all
information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from
the Lavabit email account [redacted] including encryption keys
and SSL keys.”
A search warrant and SSL key would grant the government
unobstructed access to Lavabit’s servers, and a court informed
Levinson that he would be fined $5,000 each day he refused to
hand over the necessary information.
“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,”
Levinson wrote on August 8. “After significant soul searching, I
have decided to suspend operations.”
Now embroiled in a costly legal battle, Levinson has already
raised over $20,000 to pay the necessary legal fees. That makes
up half of Levinson’s goal, he said, because unfortunately
“defending the constitution is expensive.”
Copyright: RT