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."

Comments

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this summary mentioning Mr. Snowden's e-mail account, or that of Mr. Snowdenâ(TM)? Apostrophes aren't all that difficult, are they?

Subjugation of laws

[jraff2]

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.

Lavabit was a horrible idea anyway

[Sloppy]

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.