{"id":21590,"date":"2013-08-11T11:40:48","date_gmt":"2013-08-11T16:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21590"},"modified":"2013-08-11T11:40:48","modified_gmt":"2013-08-11T16:40:48","slug":"speculations-on-why-lavabit-went-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/11\/speculations-on-why-lavabit-went-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"Speculations on why Lavabit went dark"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The New Yorker<\/em>, Michael Phillips<\/a> tries to outline the legal picture around the Lavabit shutdown:<\/p>\n

In mid-July, Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch\u2019s Moscow office, wrote on her Facebook<\/em> wall that she had received an e-mail from edsnowden@lavabit.com. It requested that she attend a press conference at Moscow\u2019s Sheremetyevo International Airport to discuss the N.S.A. leaker\u2019s \u201csituation.\u201d This was the wider public\u2019s introduction to Lavabit, an e-mail service prized for its security. Lavabit promised, for instance, that messages stored on the service using asymmetric encryption, which encrypts incoming e-mails before they\u2019re saved on Lavabit\u2019s servers, could not even be read by Lavabit itself.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, Lavabit went dark. In a cryptic statement posted on the Web site, the service\u2019s owner and operator, Ladar Levison, wrote, \u201cI cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.\u201d Those experiences led him to shut down the service rather than, as he put it, \u201cbecome complicit in crimes against the American people.\u201d Lavabit users reacted with consumer vitriol on the company\u2019s Facebook<\/em> page (\u201cWhat about our emails?\u201d), but the tide quickly turned toward government critique. By the end of the night, a similar service, Silent Circle, also shut down its encrypted e-mail product, calling the Lavabit affair the \u201cwriting [on] the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which secret surveillance scheme is involved in the Lavabit case? The company may have received a national-security letter, which is a demand issued by a federal agency (typically the F.B.I.) that the recipient turn over data about other individuals. These letters often forbid recipients from discussing it with anyone. Another possibility is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may have issued a warrant ordering Lavabit to participate in ongoing e-mail surveillance. We can\u2019t be completely sure: as Judge Reggie Walton, the presiding judge of the FISA court, explained to Senator Patrick Leahy in a letter dated July 29th, FISA proceedings, decisions, and legal rationales are typically secret. America\u2019s surveillance programs are secret, as are the court proceedings that enable them and the legal rationales that justify them; informed dissents, like those by Levison or Senator Ron Wyden, must be kept secret. The reasons for all this secrecy are also secret. That some of the secrets are out has not deterred the Obama Administration from prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act for disclosure of classified information. Call it meta-secrecy. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The New Yorker, Michael Phillips tries to outline the legal picture around the Lavabit shutdown: In mid-July, Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch\u2019s Moscow office, wrote on her Facebook wall that she had received an e-mail from edsnowden@lavabit.com. It requested that she attend a press conference at Moscow\u2019s Sheremetyevo International Airport […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,9,10,13],"tags":[58,913,154,911],"class_list":["post-21590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-law","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-internet","tag-nsa","tag-privacy","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Ce","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21591,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21590\/revisions\/21591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}