WikiLeaks

[Lamplighter]

Remember this posting at the beginning of the Snowden affair with Wikileaks...

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

The Guardian has a more detailed discussion of this shut-down and of Silent Circle...

The Guardian
Spencer Ackerman
8/9/13

Lavabit email service abruptly shut down citing government interference

A judge has unsealed documents in the case related to this event,
and this 2-page article has a fascinating account of how Ladar Levison
maintained his integrity while fighting the feds, by ending up having
to close his business... the email service, Lavabit.

Well worth the read...


NY Times
By NICOLE PERLROTH and SCOTT SHANE
October 2, 2013

As F.B.I. Pursued Snowden, an E-Mail Service Stood Firm

One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find
an F.B.I. agent’s business card on his Dallas doorstep.
So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end
with Mr. Levison’s shutting the business he had spent a decade building
and becoming an unlikely hero of privacy advocates in their escalating battle
with the government over Internet security.

But they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code
that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages
of all his customers. That, he said, was too much.

“You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,”
Mr. Levison, 32, said in a recent interview. “In my case, they wanted to break open
the entire box just to get to one connection.”
<snip>
When it was clear Mr. Levison had no choice but to comply,
he devised a way to obey the order but make the government’s intrusion more arduous.
On Aug 2, he infuriated agents by printing the encryption keys
— long strings of seemingly random numbers — on paper in a font
he believed would be hard to scan and turn into a usable digital format.
Indeed, prosecutors described the file as “largely illegible.”
<snip>