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| Edward Snowden's email service, |
| Edward Snowden's email service, in a legal tug of war with the FBI
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 3-October-2013
9:51:37 AM |
| One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find an FBI agent's business card on his Dallas doorstep. So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end with 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.
Prosecutors, it turned out, were pursuing a notable user of Lavabit, Levison's secure email service: Edward J Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents that have put the intelligence agency under sharp scrutiny. Levison was willing to allow investigators with a court order to tap Snowden's email account; he had complied with similar narrowly targeted requests involving other customers some two dozen times.
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," Levison, 32, said in a recent interview. "In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection."
On August 8, Levison closed Lavabit rather than, in his view, betray his promise of secure email to his customers. The move, which he explained in a letter on his website, drew fervent support from civil libertarians but was seen by prosecutors as an act of defiance that fell just short of a crime.
The full story of what happened to Levison since May has not previously been told, in part because he was subject to a court's gag order. But on Wednesday, a federal judge unsealed documents in the case, allowing the tech entrepreneur to speak candidly for the first time about his experiences. He had been summoned to testify to a grand jury in Virginia; forbidden to discuss his case;
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