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Snowden Finally Identified As Target of Investigation That Ended Lavabit (washingtontimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Times: Three years after a government investigation forced the shuttering of Lavabit, a Texas-based email provider, its CEO revealed Friday that an account belonging to Edward Snowden spurred the probe that put his company out of business. "Ladar Levison shut down his encrypted webmail service in August 2013 amid an FBI investigation focused on one of his company's nearly half-a-million customers," reports The Washington Times. "A gag-order that has just recently been vacated in federal has legally prevented him up until now from confirming the account in question was registered to none other than the NSA contractor attributed with one of the largest intelligence leaks in U.S. history. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton nullified the mandatory non-disclosure orders in a June 13 court filing that went unnoticed until Lavabit released a statement Friday. Officially, the consent order approved by Judge Hilton in the Eastern District of Virginia earlier this month removes all gag-orders concerning Lavabit and Mr. Levison with regards to a grand jury investigation that led the FBI to Mr. Snowdenâ(TM)s email account. 'While Iâ(TM)m pleased that I can finally speak freely about the target of the investigation, I also know the fight to protect our collective freedom is far from over,' Mr. Levison said in a statement. He said he plans to discuss the case further during the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas this summer."
Is this summary mentioning Mr. Snowden's e-mail account, or that of Mr. Snowdenâ(TM)? Apostrophes aren't all that difficult, are they?
How did lavabit encrypt exactly? Did they use open-source tech I could use on my own servers?
i won't believe our justice system holds any actual justice until these individuals are arrested and taken to court for wilful violation of their oaths of office and for violating the 4th amendment rights of 300 million US citizens (and the civil rights of innocent people all around the world):
James Clapper
Dianne Feinstein
Keith Alexander
Mike Rogers
George W Bush
Barack Obama
There are probably others too, but at least those people. It shouldn't be a witch-hunt. They deserve the presumption of innocence, due process, and to be tried by a jury of their peers the same as anyone does. Still, there is plenty of reasonable cause for them to stand trial.
If we are not willing to do this, then our society has devolved into "laws for thee but not for me". If that's what we want, then fine, but let's make it official, and write it into our legal system that high ranking party officials are considered to be above the law. Let's pass a new constitutional amendment to that effect: we no longer want government officials to be subject to the law. And let's repeal the 4th, which we can do with a 2/3 majority of states voting for that. It would at least be honest.
About this bit which came out in March 2016
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/
I did a quick Google search but didn't come across the same Slashdot link and I'm too lazy to spend more than 2 seconds looking, sorry.
>" the fight to protect our collective freedom is far from over"
Oh i'd say it IS over. Samaritan and his goons have won...
How would knowing about he order have affected anything?
1. Lavabit falsely claimed that even Lavabit itself couldn't read customers' mail. A lie. Otherwise it wouldn't have needed to take such drastic measures when the FBI wanted its help to read Snowden's mail.
2. Ladar created the "Dark Mail Initiative" Kickstarter project, collected over $200K from gullible backers, then disappeared the cash and delivered nothing.
Enough said.
How would knowing about he order have affected anything?
What possible purpose could that gag order have served? It's not like Snowden or the rest of the world didn't know to stop trusting Lavabit.
The only motivation I can see is an attempt to avoid public outcry that is a gross abuse of power. The like of which is only seen in dictatorships under the heading of "political stability".
I guess we all knew the US had serious corruption issues, now the question is if anyone will be held accountable for this.
(I'm kidding of course: nobody will be held accountable, this is was free speech being suppressed not availability of fire arms)
And here I thought they revealed it was snowden back in march.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Well unless there happened to be another unrelated Ed_snowden@lavabit.com
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Title says it all. Bastards. PJ had to shut down one of the best sites on the net over this.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
We'll still have fucktards here claiming that the lesser of two evils aren't evil at all.
How the fuck have we come to this?
It is a misnomer to deem anything they do as "intelligence". They peddle child porn and set up booby trapped websites to database you for their unknown masters.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/01/28/how-the-fbi-became-the-worlds-largest-distributor-of-child-sex-abuse-imagery/
Meanwhile it is their unknown masters (and them) distributing it in the first place.
Every spy is a liar. You can not be a spy unless you are a liar. They lie for money just like whores.
If the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are the supreme laws in this country then the WHOLE Judiciary needs to be re-educated in them. The Bill of rights as it's 1st item clearly states Freedom of Speech is an inalienable right. Unless there is some reinterpretation of "inalienable" that clearly indicates one's freedom to say ANYTHING can NOT be infringed, PERIOD, NSL are wothless! The real problem comes when one wants to get the Supreme Court to hear and rule on same.
This is a case where evil had a good side-effect: people aren't using lavabit anymore. That's good news for all privacy/security advocates.
The whole reason lavabit was attacked by the government, is that the government's attack would have worked. It is totally absurd for people to be downloading their email client plus pgp implementation from the server every time they want to read their email. The government wanted to compromise the client to have it log Snowden's key, and they decided the best tactic was to stick a gun in the lavabit guy's face.
Lavabit's users (including Snowden) are lucky that the government resorted to such thuggery, since you can't intimidate someone without their knowledge. So lavabit knew about the attack and since the Levison is a good guy, he shut it down. But the attackers' goal might also have been compromised by stealthy tactics instead (either by penetrating the servers, or MitM). Had that happened, lavabit wouldn't have shut down; instead, the client would have been compromised without anyone knowing.
The tech was awful, and predictable awful. Nobody should have been using lavabit, precisely because it implemented pgp as a downloaded program in the browser. Let's hope lavabit's death is the end of this kind of nonsense.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So now can the owner of Lavabit sue the federal government for costing him his business?
and next it will be revealed that Truecrypt was shutdown for a similar purpose. Forced to create a backdoor for the government. I believe that is the reason behind the end of Truecrypt.
It was helpful for the Government since when he was seeking legal help, he couldn't tell an attorney the nature of his legal problems due to the gag order and was even left without an attorney to represent him when he received a summons to appear in court on short notice.