7 ms·

I was forced to shut down Lavabit (2014)

160 points by ageofwant 10y ago

jonquark 10y ago
I know it's an old article but re-reading it is worthwhile; it is short and chilling - how have we ended up in a dystopian present where the ability to perform bulk surveillance is demanded and ruled upon in secret court rooms (in the UK where I am based the situation is even worse!). I have never found myself in the situation that Ladar Levison describes but I wonder (and fear) whether I would have the courage to shut down my business on a matter of principle like that.
- lmm 10y ago
  The only reason he had to shut down or provide bulk access is because he had built it without a system to provide specific access. You might believe the government should never be able to access private communications at all, but that would be a quite extreme position. In this case they had a (presumably legitimate) warrant for access to a specific user's emails (and while it shouldn't affect the principles at issue, it focuses the mind to remember that this was a child porn case IIRC).
  - delish 10y ago
    > it focuses the mind to remember that this was a child porn case IIRC Do you have a link? If you're referring to Lavabit's shutdown, according to this source [1], they were looking for Snowden. I've never heard Snowden associated with child porn. [1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed...
  - waterphone 10y ago
    No, it was Ed Snowden's email account.
    - at-fates-hands 10y ago
      This was recently confirmed: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed... But federal authorities recently screwed up and revealed the secret themselves when they published a cache of case documents but failed to redact one identifying piece of information about the target: his email address, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. With that, the very authorities holding the threat of jail time over Levison’s head if he said anything have confirmed what everyone had long ago presumed: that the target account was Snowden’s.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    It always is and always will be either Child Porn or Terrorists. Because nobody has the political capital to say no to either of these.
  - noxToken 10y ago
    Sexual exploitation of children is one of the most reprehensible things I can think of. Regardless eroding the privacy of everyone to maybe catch someone is not possible. Children are absolutely innocent, and they always deserve protection. Using child exploitation as a means to snoop isn't protecting; it's just a bullshit excuse at mass surveillance. There is, however, a balance to privacy.
  - Daviey 10y ago
    I can only agree with your 'quite extreme' classification, if you also agree that a physical chat between you and I in the your house (especially if we are sat in the bath or bed) should also be freely evesdropped... otherwise we are talking about the same thing, just abstracted away to the ether.
    - lmm 10y ago
      Freely eavesdropped? No. Eavesdroppable after a suitable warrant has been issued (narrowly scoped, based on probable cause, with appropriate safeguards in place)? Yes.
herbst 10y ago
And this is why i dont care how secure someone claims to be when they are based in the U.S.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  That's why whenever someone recommends PrivateInternetAccess as a VPN, I facepalm.
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    They spend lots of money on those recommendations :) Their affiliate program is probably handing out multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly at this point, even small blogs earn thousands pushing them.
    - herbst 10y ago
      So like why the world "loves godaddy". If people just would do their homework...
  - Nrsolis 10y ago
    I recommend PIA as a VPN for regular users. It's all about threat model. If I'm trying to get past a hotel firewall, an ISP deep-packet inspection system, or a coffeeshop blocking my traffic or snooping on it for profiling purposes, then PIA is a simple, reliable choice. If I'm a freedom fighter in a hostile country or a criminal with state-level adversaries, then PIA is a poor choice for you. It's not ever going to protect you against someone who wants you bad enough. The truth is that it's turtles all the way down my friend. Follow the paranoia thought-chain long enough and pretty soon you're suspicious of your own phone, the supply chain that put it in your hands, the manufacturer of the components that went into it, and the people who wrote the applications you run on it. If you're really worried about privacy, then you better not ever use technology. It's all suspect.
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      >I recommend PIA as a VPN for regular users. Why are they better than other VPN companies which do not use extraordinarily dishonest marketing tactics? Or maybe even a company that doesn't cover up leaks of customer data? Go ask PIA why they didn't speak up when they got compromised via this bug: https://kayako.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOCS/Security+advisory+2015-06-10#Securityadvisory2015-06-10-Vulnerability https://kayako.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOCS/Security+advi... Also ask them why they didn't find it during internal audits, this bug was as obvious as they come. Anyone with a clue could see it simply by looking at the cookies privateinternetaccess.com would set.
ptspts 10y ago
This is old news, the article is more than 2 years old (from May 2014).
otalp 10y ago
A good alternative present today is Protonmail(https://protonmail.com https://protonmail.com). Aside from being secure and their encryption being open source, their servers are also in Switzerland and subject to Swiss laws.
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  Can anyone compare this with Fastmail?
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    As a happy FastMail customer, I can tell you they do not attempt to have the end to end encryption that LavaBit or ProtonMail have. FastMail prefers to offer a lot of advanced features which do require their servers be able to see your data. There is a huge tradeoff between privacy and features, and while I'd argue by policy FastMail protects your privacy better than something like Gmail that uses your data for their own purposes, FastMail isn't that type of service.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    The most noticeable difference is that Protonmail's approach means "no standards". No SMTP or IMAP. All emails must be sent and received via the web interface or mobile app. That also makes it hard to switch away if you choose to leave them. Your data is captive. I don't think that their intentions are bad...it's just the nature of how it's designed.
    - ahakki 10y ago
      That is true. But just so you know: I am a paying protonmail customer and received an email just today where they anounced tha IMAP/SMTP support is in closed beta. I do not know how this is implemented and what the exact security implications are. Here is an exerpt from the email: Dear ProtonMail Plus Subscriber, We are happy to announce the beta program for a new product that adds IMAP and SMTP support to ProtonMail. We call this project the ProtonMail Bridge. The ProtonMail Bridge is among the most requested features by the community and lets you send and receive encrypted emails from within your mail client of choice. The Bridge supports any client that uses IMAP/SMTP including Outlook, Thunderbird, and AppleMail. We will be choosing only a few dozen people to start so if you are interested in participating please fill out the following form by the end of this week:
desbest 10y ago
What I don't like is how the government demands to wiretap EVERY person's account regardless of there being no suspicion of crime in every account. How can that be justified? To stop future whistleblowers? It reminds me of the Investigatory Powers Act in Britain which demands ISPs to log everyone's internet browsing history and the end of end-to-end encryption as all encryption will have to have backdoors. All that will happen, is that anonymous email providers will move to countries which are privacy friendly. It's a game of whack a mole. There's already Sigaint which is an anonymous email provider which is hosted on Tor. I'll be using Sigaint, offshore hosting and I2VPN when I launch my anonymous website.
- lmm 10y ago
  > What I don't like is how the government demands to wiretap EVERY person's account regardless of there being no suspicion of crime in every account. How can that be justified? To stop future whistleblowers? The article is giving a one-sided account. The government issued a (presumably valid) warrant to intercept messages on a specific user's account. He had designed the system such that he couldn't provide that access except by providing his keys to everything, and at first attempted to bill the government for building a system that would let him grant access to individual accounts.
  - desbest 10y ago
    No. Lavabit could have programmed a backdoor into their web interface using the private keys that allows access to only one account, but the US government wasn't happy with that.
    - res0nat0r 10y ago
      Sorry but that is exactly the opposite of what happened. From the first paragraphs: > THE U.S. GOVERNMENT in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents. > The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata, defined as “information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication.” https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed
merricksb 10y ago
See also: there was a big discussion on HN when this article was published over 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774158
cesarb 10y ago
IIRC, the Lavabit case was one of the reasons (and perhaps the strongest one) for the current push towards forward secrecy cipher suites in TLS (with TLS 1.3 even having them as the only option). Since Lavabit used the older RSA key exchange, instead of a DHE key exchange, the private key they were forced to hand over could decrypt all past HTTPS connections. With forward secret (DHE/ECDHE) key exchanges, the private key can only be used to impersonate the server; it cannot be used to decrypt any past (or future) HTTPS connections. Had Lavabit used DHE/ECDHE, they would have nothing to give. Even adding a backdoor to their servers (or a MITM logging middlebox) would gain nothing, unless the target logged in after it was installed. They would be able to simply respond "we have nothing useful to give" and be done with it, like recently happened to Whispersystems.
- spraak 10y ago
  Wow, that's amazing! Do you have a link to share regarding Whispersystems?
  - saycheese 10y ago
    Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Eastern District of Virginia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635848
  - desbest 10y ago
    Whisper Systems didn't give the data the government wanted, and they'll still operating and not banned in america. https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/ https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand...
jmnicolas 10y ago
Back then I thought Snowden made a difference, but 2 years later I believe the situation is even worse than before. Microsoft even managed to add telemetry on Windows 7, 8 and 10 without much push-back and stores your Office docs automatically on their cloud.
jakubp 10y ago
Whenever I read a story about the US justice system here on HN, it almost always includes incredible level of harassment towards peaceful, (usually) law-abiding citizens. In this particular case I was surprised (as a European) that one can be summoned to a court outside of their home town. In my country it's unthinkable that someone from another city could sue me and expect me to go there for a court hearing. I'm sure there are exceptional cases where someone might be summoned, say, to the capital, but AFAIK this would be a very unusual case. Little things like this - lies, misrepresentations, pressure; I am more scared of police and other agencies when I think of visiting the US than I am of criminals. Unsettling.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Because the government can control peaceful, law-abiding citizens. When one has a choice to deal with things one can control vs things one cannot, guess which one gets chosen?
- joatmon-snoo 10y ago
  > that one can be summoned to a court outside of their home town Generally it is very hard to do this. The U.S. actually has two levels of court systems: state (each state has their own judicial system) and federal (for cases involving federal law, agencies, and so on - IANAL so I don't actually know the full list). This rapidly gets obscenely complicated when you think about the fact that some people live in one state but work in another, about how you might handle an accident on a road trip to Disneyland, or even about how states can tax businesses that operate online, say through Amazon. In many cases you have to file in a region convenient for the defendant to respond. Federal court, even at the lowest levels, is serious stuff. Combine that with - the NSA, - implications for national security, which means everyone with a title and everyone who wants one is going to raise a hullaballoo, from the Department of State to the Department of Defense to the Department of Homeland Security, - countries around the world being pissed, and - the FBI, with explicit directives to capture Snowden, and what you get is a very well-oiled political and bureaucratic machine moving far faster than it normally would. Now, as a disclaimer, I have absolutely no experience with federal cases, but in the state civil cases that I saw when I interned at a small law firm, it was perfectly common for components of the judicial process to take weeks; it takes months and egregious conduct to be found in contempt. I was going to say that I suspected the case went to a specific subject-matter court (yes, if you have a case dealing with a specific topic X, it's possible - highly unlikely but possible - that you may have to deal with a subject-matter court), but after doing some fact-checking (https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/ https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/), it seems the suit was raised in the Eastern District of Virginia. I'm not sure exactly what it was that gave V.A. E.D. original jurisdiction over such a case, but I'm sure someone better versed in this could provide a better answer.
late2part 10y ago
You fool. How dare you suggest this was a Child Porn case? Even if it was - you dare to suggest that all of our personal liberties need to be shed to allow the executive branch to traipse through our private communication. Shame on you.
- dang 10y ago
  Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please (re-)read the following and post only civil, substantive comments from now on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13277095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13277095 and marked it off-topic.
wonderlusts 10y ago
Ladar spoke about the case at length recently, once the 3 year gag order expired - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lN-RAfzRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lN-RAfzRQ

160 points by ageofwant 10y ago

I know it's an old article but re-reading it is worthwhile; it is short and chilling - how have we ended up in a dystopian present where the ability to perform bulk surveillance is demanded and ruled upon in secret court rooms (in the UK where I am based the situation is even worse!). I have never found myself in the situation that Ladar Levison describes but I wonder (and fear) whether I would have the courage to shut down my business on a matter of principle like that.

lmm 10y ago
The only reason he had to shut down or provide bulk access is because he had built it without a system to provide specific access. You might believe the government should never be able to access private communications at all, but that would be a quite extreme position. In this case they had a (presumably legitimate) warrant for access to a specific user's emails (and while it shouldn't affect the principles at issue, it focuses the mind to remember that this was a child porn case IIRC).
- delish 10y ago
  > it focuses the mind to remember that this was a child porn case IIRC Do you have a link? If you're referring to Lavabit's shutdown, according to this source [1], they were looking for Snowden. I've never heard Snowden associated with child porn. [1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed...
- waterphone 10y ago
  No, it was Ed Snowden's email account.
  - at-fates-hands 10y ago
    This was recently confirmed: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed... But federal authorities recently screwed up and revealed the secret themselves when they published a cache of case documents but failed to redact one identifying piece of information about the target: his email address, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. With that, the very authorities holding the threat of jail time over Levison’s head if he said anything have confirmed what everyone had long ago presumed: that the target account was Snowden’s.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  It always is and always will be either Child Porn or Terrorists. Because nobody has the political capital to say no to either of these.
- noxToken 10y ago
  Sexual exploitation of children is one of the most reprehensible things I can think of. Regardless eroding the privacy of everyone to maybe catch someone is not possible. Children are absolutely innocent, and they always deserve protection. Using child exploitation as a means to snoop isn't protecting; it's just a bullshit excuse at mass surveillance. There is, however, a balance to privacy.
- Daviey 10y ago
  I can only agree with your 'quite extreme' classification, if you also agree that a physical chat between you and I in the your house (especially if we are sat in the bath or bed) should also be freely evesdropped... otherwise we are talking about the same thing, just abstracted away to the ether.
  - lmm 10y ago
    Freely eavesdropped? No. Eavesdroppable after a suitable warrant has been issued (narrowly scoped, based on probable cause, with appropriate safeguards in place)? Yes.

herbst 10y ago

And this is why i dont care how secure someone claims to be when they are based in the U.S.

imaginenore 10y ago
That's why whenever someone recommends PrivateInternetAccess as a VPN, I facepalm.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  They spend lots of money on those recommendations :) Their affiliate program is probably handing out multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly at this point, even small blogs earn thousands pushing them.
  - herbst 10y ago
    So like why the world "loves godaddy". If people just would do their homework...
- Nrsolis 10y ago
  I recommend PIA as a VPN for regular users. It's all about threat model. If I'm trying to get past a hotel firewall, an ISP deep-packet inspection system, or a coffeeshop blocking my traffic or snooping on it for profiling purposes, then PIA is a simple, reliable choice. If I'm a freedom fighter in a hostile country or a criminal with state-level adversaries, then PIA is a poor choice for you. It's not ever going to protect you against someone who wants you bad enough. The truth is that it's turtles all the way down my friend. Follow the paranoia thought-chain long enough and pretty soon you're suspicious of your own phone, the supply chain that put it in your hands, the manufacturer of the components that went into it, and the people who wrote the applications you run on it. If you're really worried about privacy, then you better not ever use technology. It's all suspect.
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    >I recommend PIA as a VPN for regular users. Why are they better than other VPN companies which do not use extraordinarily dishonest marketing tactics? Or maybe even a company that doesn't cover up leaks of customer data? Go ask PIA why they didn't speak up when they got compromised via this bug: https://kayako.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOCS/Security+advisory+2015-06-10#Securityadvisory2015-06-10-Vulnerability https://kayako.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOCS/Security+advi... Also ask them why they didn't find it during internal audits, this bug was as obvious as they come. Anyone with a clue could see it simply by looking at the cookies privateinternetaccess.com would set.

ptspts 10y ago

This is old news, the article is more than 2 years old (from May 2014).

otalp 10y ago

A good alternative present today is Protonmail(https://protonmail.com https://protonmail.com). Aside from being secure and their encryption being open source, their servers are also in Switzerland and subject to Swiss laws.

pvdebbe 10y ago
Can anyone compare this with Fastmail?
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  As a happy FastMail customer, I can tell you they do not attempt to have the end to end encryption that LavaBit or ProtonMail have. FastMail prefers to offer a lot of advanced features which do require their servers be able to see your data. There is a huge tradeoff between privacy and features, and while I'd argue by policy FastMail protects your privacy better than something like Gmail that uses your data for their own purposes, FastMail isn't that type of service.
- tyingq 10y ago
  The most noticeable difference is that Protonmail's approach means "no standards". No SMTP or IMAP. All emails must be sent and received via the web interface or mobile app. That also makes it hard to switch away if you choose to leave them. Your data is captive. I don't think that their intentions are bad...it's just the nature of how it's designed.
  - ahakki 10y ago
    That is true. But just so you know: I am a paying protonmail customer and received an email just today where they anounced tha IMAP/SMTP support is in closed beta. I do not know how this is implemented and what the exact security implications are. Here is an exerpt from the email: Dear ProtonMail Plus Subscriber, We are happy to announce the beta program for a new product that adds IMAP and SMTP support to ProtonMail. We call this project the ProtonMail Bridge. The ProtonMail Bridge is among the most requested features by the community and lets you send and receive encrypted emails from within your mail client of choice. The Bridge supports any client that uses IMAP/SMTP including Outlook, Thunderbird, and AppleMail. We will be choosing only a few dozen people to start so if you are interested in participating please fill out the following form by the end of this week:

desbest 10y ago

What I don't like is how the government demands to wiretap EVERY person's account regardless of there being no suspicion of crime in every account. How can that be justified? To stop future whistleblowers? It reminds me of the Investigatory Powers Act in Britain which demands ISPs to log everyone's internet browsing history and the end of end-to-end encryption as all encryption will have to have backdoors. All that will happen, is that anonymous email providers will move to countries which are privacy friendly. It's a game of whack a mole. There's already Sigaint which is an anonymous email provider which is hosted on Tor. I'll be using Sigaint, offshore hosting and I2VPN when I launch my anonymous website.

lmm 10y ago
> What I don't like is how the government demands to wiretap EVERY person's account regardless of there being no suspicion of crime in every account. How can that be justified? To stop future whistleblowers? The article is giving a one-sided account. The government issued a (presumably valid) warrant to intercept messages on a specific user's account. He had designed the system such that he couldn't provide that access except by providing his keys to everything, and at first attempted to bill the government for building a system that would let him grant access to individual accounts.
- desbest 10y ago
  No. Lavabit could have programmed a backdoor into their web interface using the private keys that allows access to only one account, but the US government wasn't happy with that.
  - res0nat0r 10y ago
    Sorry but that is exactly the opposite of what happened. From the first paragraphs: > THE U.S. GOVERNMENT in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents. > The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata, defined as “information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication.” https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed

merricksb 10y ago

See also: there was a big discussion on HN when this article was published over 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774158

cesarb 10y ago

IIRC, the Lavabit case was one of the reasons (and perhaps the strongest one) for the current push towards forward secrecy cipher suites in TLS (with TLS 1.3 even having them as the only option). Since Lavabit used the older RSA key exchange, instead of a DHE key exchange, the private key they were forced to hand over could decrypt all past HTTPS connections. With forward secret (DHE/ECDHE) key exchanges, the private key can only be used to impersonate the server; it cannot be used to decrypt any past (or future) HTTPS connections. Had Lavabit used DHE/ECDHE, they would have nothing to give. Even adding a backdoor to their servers (or a MITM logging middlebox) would gain nothing, unless the target logged in after it was installed. They would be able to simply respond "we have nothing useful to give" and be done with it, like recently happened to Whispersystems.

spraak 10y ago
Wow, that's amazing! Do you have a link to share regarding Whispersystems?
- saycheese 10y ago
  Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Eastern District of Virginia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635848
- desbest 10y ago
  Whisper Systems didn't give the data the government wanted, and they'll still operating and not banned in america. https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/ https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand...

jmnicolas 10y ago

Back then I thought Snowden made a difference, but 2 years later I believe the situation is even worse than before. Microsoft even managed to add telemetry on Windows 7, 8 and 10 without much push-back and stores your Office docs automatically on their cloud.

jakubp 10y ago

Whenever I read a story about the US justice system here on HN, it almost always includes incredible level of harassment towards peaceful, (usually) law-abiding citizens. In this particular case I was surprised (as a European) that one can be summoned to a court outside of their home town. In my country it's unthinkable that someone from another city could sue me and expect me to go there for a court hearing. I'm sure there are exceptional cases where someone might be summoned, say, to the capital, but AFAIK this would be a very unusual case. Little things like this - lies, misrepresentations, pressure; I am more scared of police and other agencies when I think of visiting the US than I am of criminals. Unsettling.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Because the government can control peaceful, law-abiding citizens. When one has a choice to deal with things one can control vs things one cannot, guess which one gets chosen?
joatmon-snoo 10y ago
> that one can be summoned to a court outside of their home town Generally it is very hard to do this. The U.S. actually has two levels of court systems: state (each state has their own judicial system) and federal (for cases involving federal law, agencies, and so on - IANAL so I don't actually know the full list). This rapidly gets obscenely complicated when you think about the fact that some people live in one state but work in another, about how you might handle an accident on a road trip to Disneyland, or even about how states can tax businesses that operate online, say through Amazon. In many cases you have to file in a region convenient for the defendant to respond. Federal court, even at the lowest levels, is serious stuff. Combine that with - the NSA, - implications for national security, which means everyone with a title and everyone who wants one is going to raise a hullaballoo, from the Department of State to the Department of Defense to the Department of Homeland Security, - countries around the world being pissed, and - the FBI, with explicit directives to capture Snowden, and what you get is a very well-oiled political and bureaucratic machine moving far faster than it normally would. Now, as a disclaimer, I have absolutely no experience with federal cases, but in the state civil cases that I saw when I interned at a small law firm, it was perfectly common for components of the judicial process to take weeks; it takes months and egregious conduct to be found in contempt. I was going to say that I suspected the case went to a specific subject-matter court (yes, if you have a case dealing with a specific topic X, it's possible - highly unlikely but possible - that you may have to deal with a subject-matter court), but after doing some fact-checking (https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/ https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/), it seems the suit was raised in the Eastern District of Virginia. I'm not sure exactly what it was that gave V.A. E.D. original jurisdiction over such a case, but I'm sure someone better versed in this could provide a better answer.

late2part 10y ago

You fool. How dare you suggest this was a Child Porn case? Even if it was - you dare to suggest that all of our personal liberties need to be shed to allow the executive branch to traipse through our private communication. Shame on you.

dang 10y ago
Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please (re-)read the following and post only civil, substantive comments from now on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13277095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13277095 and marked it off-topic.

wonderlusts 10y ago

Ladar spoke about the case at length recently, once the 3 year gag order expired - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lN-RAfzRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lN-RAfzRQ