14 ms·

For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored

by lmkg 13y ago

For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers. The linked email would lend some credence to those claims. It was originally designed in contrast to gmail scanning your email for targeted advertising, but my imperfect memory says that their system should also have been resilient to "we have a warrant, hand over the data."

raganwald 13y ago
Well, he may not have been able to hand over the old data, but he may have been asked to include an exploit for all mail going forward. That could have been as simple as the authorities inserting some middleware.
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  This actually did happen with hushmail. It's hosted in Canada, but the US leaned on them hard enough that they ended up backdooring the client to let the feds snoop on the targeted user.
  - computer 13y ago
    Background: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/
  - 616c 13y ago
    That is not quite what happened. As the link below says, it was not an exploit. Users were warned that using pure IMAP access and/or webmail, which was a convenience feature and continues to be with them, would require your private key. It was recommended you do not do that, and use the provided Java applet or mobile app. The person in question in those criminal proceedings used one of those convenience functions, if memory serves. Not that defend Hushmail. I do not, fuck 'em for that. There are plenty of services like Lavabit that avoid that problem, but that requires intelligent users/criminals/what-have-you.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      "It was recommended you do not do that, and use the provided Java applet" Which is equally insecure, as the company could easily insert a back door the next time you load the applet. Hushmail was and is snake oil.
      - 616c 13y ago
        For sure, but can I fault idiots for inability to read the documentation and caveats? Maybe, but not really lest most on this site could not "do computers" professionally. Unfortunately, the trust problem you mention is pervasive. It was a signed applet IIRC, but we both requires you trust the original and modified applets from the developer. I am wishing someone released an auto-encrypting PGP service and client, open-sourced on purpose. We all know only four people would read the source of that, and two of those would verify the dev key given with the release. :-)
        rdl 13y ago
        The correct way to do a signed applet or signed extension is to give the signing key to a third party who has responsibility for auditing it, or at least being "out of the subpoena chain" so when bad stuff happens, they suddenly stop signing new versions. I kind of wish there were a (well armed) organization which did this for other projects.
        SimHacker 13y ago
        Well, it looks like we got ourselves a reader. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE
        616c 13y ago
        Unfortunately, I cannot find a clip of this from the movie Ronin. One of my favorites with Robert DeNiro as a criminal or spy, and not even his own gang of crooks are trusting of him. Among my many favorite quotes (I am reviewing all of them and laughing; the movie is a goldmine [0]): Spence: You think too hard. Sam (DeNiro): Nobody ever told me that before. [0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122690/quotes http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122690/quotes
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Perhaps such a request is why they have shut down?
  - chmars 13y ago
    That's reasonable. And while you can get already in trouble for not having stored user data in the past, you cannot really refuse to store user data from now on. Ergo probably this surprise shutdown now … :(
- MagicWishMonkey 13y ago
  The feds wanted to install a prism device on his network, not sure if he shut everything down to prevent that from happening or if there are other factors at play. The guy who runs the service is one of my best friends. He's the kind of guy who would burn the server farm to the ground before he did something that violated the terms dictated in his privacy policy.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    If true, you probably shouldn't put these details here (especially mentioning that he's one of your best friends). I was curious to know, of course, but I'm afraid that this could somehow be used against him later.
onli 13y ago
And this reads as if someone was trying to force him to install means to spy on his users, and it wouldn't be surprising if the aim was to spy on Snowden directly (if he really used this service).
- raganwald 13y ago
  It may be simpler than that. Even if Snowden has walked away from this service, the publicity may have attracted a lot of people the authorities find interesting, including legitimate (whatever that means) persons of interest.
  - toyg 13y ago
    The political backlash attached to slapping an NSL on "Snowden's email provider" would have looked obvious to a 5-year-old, and any real player worth its salt would have run from Lavabit as soon as it hit the news. No, this has nothing to do with common criminals and everything to do with Snowden.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Didn't Italy nail a mob boss a few years ago because they were using a common substitution cipher?
      - pchristensen 13y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Yup, that's the guy: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/mafia_boss_secu.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/mafia_boss_sec...
    - ptwiggens 13y ago
computer 13y ago
It wouldn't be resilient to interception of mail going to and coming from lavabit however, since email is essentially a plaintext public protocol.
- marssaxman 13y ago
  ...which is why you encrypt the contents before you send it, yes?
  - wmf 13y ago
    Considering that most other people don't use email encryption, no.
  - jethro_tell 13y ago
    This is why the speculation that even with encrypted emails, to and from address is in the clear and that could be valuable info to government. So we're back to meta data in plain text both in transit and storage.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  What? I don't think this is true at all. Plaintext data, email or not, can be protected with robust encryption. Your end security is the main consideration, but that has nothing to do with the protocol or content, really.
  - jarrett 13y ago
    The difficulty is that most recipients of your message will not be willing to use whatever crypto technology you've chosen. PGP is probably the most popular email encryption system, but good luck finding people who use it. I work in the software industry, and I don't regularly correspond with a single person whom I know to use PGP.
    - grey-area 13y ago
      It'll be interesting to see whether companies start to shift to using encrypted email over the next few decades - it's not that hard to set up if you know the counterparty will be using encryption of the same kind, and if it's not a service bought in from an external company you can fairly sure it is secure. Companies could at least insist that intra-company email is encrypted, which would be a huge amount of their normal communications, and then extend that outside their boundaries with partners who also accept (say) S/MIME. At present I sign my mails but like you have no clients who use encryption.
JamesArgo 13y ago
Hushmail is a similar service. There's been some speculation that authorities could compel the owners to perform a sort of internal phishing scam to get the passwords.
- dmix 13y ago
  It's not speculation: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ > a federal prosecution of alleged steroid dealers reveals the Canadian company turned over 12 CDs worth of e-mails from three Hushmail accounts, following a court order obtained through a mutual assistance treaty between the U.S. and Canada.
ry0ohki 13y ago
It seems like the most secure way to send a message these days might be snail mail. While I know the feds to open it from time to time in specific cases, they definitely don't open all.
- jes5199 13y ago
  no, they don't open the mail, but they scan all the addresses as part of their routing process. We should assume that all postal "metadata" is stored forever.
  - gemma 13y ago
    As a veteran of the USPS software industry, I wouldn't worry too much.
    - simonebrunozzi 13y ago
      LOL :)
    - shitgoose 13y ago
      hilarious!! since we on the subject, are there any veterans of NSA software industry who can share some insight?
      - Achshar 13y ago
        I assume they would be under some sort of NDA.
  - gsibble 13y ago
    It is: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...
- eplanit 13y ago
  There is a lot to be said for Snail Mail in that regard. There are far more privacy guarantees (i.e. clearly defined requirements for warrants, and stricter terms) relative to electronic forms of communications.
yajoe 13y ago
Edit: I was a PM on Exchange and Exchange Hosted Encryption for some time, so it looks like Lavabit tried to fight the government on whether they are required to release private keys. I've seen one other customer try to fight, and it was not pretty either. The US government in these cases are serious. Takeaway for fellow hackers: If you are building a system that stores user-generated data, prepare for the eventuality that someone other than the user will demand to see it. In general, the prevailing theory is that all companies are required to release private keys or passwords needed to unlock evidence. As a consequence of Lavabit fighting, they likely got slapped with some pretty harsh contempt of court rulings, including a demand to record all private keys needed for decryption going forward. The worst case (that I can talk about) I saw involved requiring a specific employee be demoted due to improper care of a company's systems. What's sad is that because Lavabit was such a small service provider, they never had the previous rounds of government threats and must have been caught off guard. As I've said in past posts (before Snowden), it is common knowledge among large-scale service providers that the local government can always come in to take a look. Doesn't matter if you are in the US, EU, or China, you have to comply. I've seen the US DOJ threaten pretty harshly a customer who simply asked about 'options' of how to comply. Past post with explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754641 P.S. Right or wrong is a separate conversation...
- anoncowherd 13y ago
  > P.S. Right or wrong is a separate conversation... No it's not. This is wrong, plain and simple. Wrong is wrong, and black is black.
- rdl 13y ago
  I think the worst they can realistically do is 1) threaten contempt if you can comply but don't and 2) threaten to disrupt your business operations by seizing servers. There are gag orders on certain legal requests, but you don't have to talk about it to not comply (if you can't comply). As long as you can't comply, I don't think there's an uncounterable risk in the US, since we don't have any key disclosure requirements (the exception being CALEA, which only applies to the PSTN; I'd skip CALEA for an interconnected VOIP system and fight them in the courts/media, personally). Presumably they could put other weird pressure on you like threatening to investigate your nanny's immigration status or whatever, but enh. I still maintain that if you do things properly, you can operate safely in the US while resisting pressure from USG. You can't literally wipe your ass with an NSL in front of the agents, but if you don't have it, and can't get it, they're at worst a DoS. Forcing a provider to implement a huge new logging infrastructure would be an interesting 14A issue, and one could have a system where even that wouldn't recover customer keys. IANAL of course.
toddsiegel 13y ago
The data may have been protected, but the senders and recipients probably were not. Similarly to SSL, it encrypts the traffic, but does not hide which websites you use. I bet that data are still valuable to the government. I have been thinking of starting a business in the privacy space. This has shown me that that all customer data needs to be periodically obliterated in safe way and that a kill switch or nuke button is needed as well to destroy everything on a moment's notice. Where and how to host is a major concern. Cloud, etc., is obviously out of the question.
- chmike 13y ago
  Apparently a business where some guy is moving paper mail icognito from one point to the ther could be a possible business. I guess lawyers may want this, especially lawyers working to defend issues related to abuse of privacy breach or executive actions. Of course it will be hard to advertise such business. If you'll be trying to keep this secrect by creating small cells of people not knowing each other and smart mailboxes preventing people exchanging t identify each other, you'll become suspect of supporting spying activity. So you better work for the minimal number of clients and charge a lot to remain sustainble. My understanding is that as long as keep the info concentrated in one spot (i.e. Paper mail) it is easy to grab it. If you dilute and spread the info using shared secret and hide it smartly in images or random text, this info would be much harder to catch but could use conventionnal transport means. Extending this idea further, turn the mail network into one big world wide hologram. The information would then be spreaded, available from everywhere, very hard to censor, and private since you need some specific reference signal to extract the info. It's like shared secret. Note however that the need to catch evil people using such communication system for evil means is needed. Just considering our own privacy regardless of what can go wrong with such system is in my opinion selfish. We will always need method to protect against abuses.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    Reminds me of the plot in the game Mirror's Edge, where couriers would physically deliver data instead of electronically, since there is no way to be sure that it isn't being intercepted. Such a thing might already be in practice already.
wmboy 13y ago
So... there would be market for a secure email service that ran on a ship/vessel that was permanently in the middle of international waters? (might have to have multiple vessel's for redundancy purposes)
- freshhawk 13y ago
  So guarantee you will be regarded as a "terrorist" and then put yourself somewhere in the middle of international waters? At least when the ship disappeared off the face of the earth it would be easy to figure out what happened.
  - woah 13y ago
    Pretty sad world we live in that this is entirely realistic.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - freshhawk 13y ago
      I suppose, but looking at it another way: for the first time in human history we can imagine a world where this wouldn't be the case. We are closer to that world than we've ever been, even if right now the west is moving away from it again.
- marcofloriano 13y ago
  The Pirate Bay team are implementing something like that, i believe. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Pirate-Bay-Orbit-Serves-Space-Drones,15051.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Pirate-Bay-Orbit-Serves-Spa...
- defen 13y ago
  IANAAL, but I'm guessing the U.S. would just pressure your flag state to revoke your license. Then they'll arrest you for piracy or something. Or even better issue a letter of marque and reprisal so private citizens can hunt you down and take your stuff.
adrianwaj 13y ago
"encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers" how is that possible? I'm curious to know as to how they achieved that technically. I mean if the user is reading an email in their browser, then it would've had to have been created on the server first.
- babby 13y ago
  It's just how encryption works; you don't store the plain passwords or keys the users submit to decrypt their stuff, thus you have no way to access it.
- cozeulodorieso 13y ago
  Lavabit's explanation of their security, via the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com/secure.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com...
- rorrr2 13y ago
  It all happens on the client side. Servers only store the encrypted emails and have no idea what the contents or the keys are.
  - adrianwaj 13y ago
    right, but incoming and outgoing emails from lavabit servers won't necessarily be encrypted, unless the other party is using GPG or whatever - it's just the way they're stored.
  - moutarde 13y ago
    The same server(s) also control the JavaScript code run by the client/browser. They could serve special code (to any one the government wanted to spy on) that returned their password to the server.
    - rorrr2 13y ago
      That's exactly why LavaBit shut down, looks like they were forced to do that.
easytiger 13y ago
it sounds like they were asked to modify their system to retain data

by lmkg 13y ago

raganwald 13y ago

Well, he may not have been able to hand over the old data, but he may have been asked to include an exploit for all mail going forward. That could have been as simple as the authorities inserting some middleware.

lawnchair_larry 13y ago
This actually did happen with hushmail. It's hosted in Canada, but the US leaned on them hard enough that they ended up backdooring the client to let the feds snoop on the targeted user.
- computer 13y ago
  Background: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/
- 616c 13y ago
  That is not quite what happened. As the link below says, it was not an exploit. Users were warned that using pure IMAP access and/or webmail, which was a convenience feature and continues to be with them, would require your private key. It was recommended you do not do that, and use the provided Java applet or mobile app. The person in question in those criminal proceedings used one of those convenience functions, if memory serves. Not that defend Hushmail. I do not, fuck 'em for that. There are plenty of services like Lavabit that avoid that problem, but that requires intelligent users/criminals/what-have-you.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    "It was recommended you do not do that, and use the provided Java applet" Which is equally insecure, as the company could easily insert a back door the next time you load the applet. Hushmail was and is snake oil.
    - 616c 13y ago
      For sure, but can I fault idiots for inability to read the documentation and caveats? Maybe, but not really lest most on this site could not "do computers" professionally. Unfortunately, the trust problem you mention is pervasive. It was a signed applet IIRC, but we both requires you trust the original and modified applets from the developer. I am wishing someone released an auto-encrypting PGP service and client, open-sourced on purpose. We all know only four people would read the source of that, and two of those would verify the dev key given with the release. :-)
      - rdl 13y ago
        The correct way to do a signed applet or signed extension is to give the signing key to a third party who has responsibility for auditing it, or at least being "out of the subpoena chain" so when bad stuff happens, they suddenly stop signing new versions. I kind of wish there were a (well armed) organization which did this for other projects.
      - SimHacker 13y ago
        Well, it looks like we got ourselves a reader. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE
        616c 13y ago
        Unfortunately, I cannot find a clip of this from the movie Ronin. One of my favorites with Robert DeNiro as a criminal or spy, and not even his own gang of crooks are trusting of him. Among my many favorite quotes (I am reviewing all of them and laughing; the movie is a goldmine [0]): Spence: You think too hard. Sam (DeNiro): Nobody ever told me that before. [0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122690/quotes http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122690/quotes
jlgreco 13y ago
Perhaps such a request is why they have shut down?
- chmars 13y ago
  That's reasonable. And while you can get already in trouble for not having stored user data in the past, you cannot really refuse to store user data from now on. Ergo probably this surprise shutdown now … :(
MagicWishMonkey 13y ago
The feds wanted to install a prism device on his network, not sure if he shut everything down to prevent that from happening or if there are other factors at play. The guy who runs the service is one of my best friends. He's the kind of guy who would burn the server farm to the ground before he did something that violated the terms dictated in his privacy policy.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  If true, you probably shouldn't put these details here (especially mentioning that he's one of your best friends). I was curious to know, of course, but I'm afraid that this could somehow be used against him later.

onli 13y ago

And this reads as if someone was trying to force him to install means to spy on his users, and it wouldn't be surprising if the aim was to spy on Snowden directly (if he really used this service).

raganwald 13y ago
It may be simpler than that. Even if Snowden has walked away from this service, the publicity may have attracted a lot of people the authorities find interesting, including legitimate (whatever that means) persons of interest.
- toyg 13y ago
  The political backlash attached to slapping an NSL on "Snowden's email provider" would have looked obvious to a 5-year-old, and any real player worth its salt would have run from Lavabit as soon as it hit the news. No, this has nothing to do with common criminals and everything to do with Snowden.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Didn't Italy nail a mob boss a few years ago because they were using a common substitution cipher?
    - pchristensen 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Yup, that's the guy: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/mafia_boss_secu.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/mafia_boss_sec...
  - ptwiggens 13y ago

computer 13y ago

It wouldn't be resilient to interception of mail going to and coming from lavabit however, since email is essentially a plaintext public protocol.

marssaxman 13y ago
...which is why you encrypt the contents before you send it, yes?
- wmf 13y ago
  Considering that most other people don't use email encryption, no.
- jethro_tell 13y ago
  This is why the speculation that even with encrypted emails, to and from address is in the clear and that could be valuable info to government. So we're back to meta data in plain text both in transit and storage.
devindotcom 13y ago
What? I don't think this is true at all. Plaintext data, email or not, can be protected with robust encryption. Your end security is the main consideration, but that has nothing to do with the protocol or content, really.
- jarrett 13y ago
  The difficulty is that most recipients of your message will not be willing to use whatever crypto technology you've chosen. PGP is probably the most popular email encryption system, but good luck finding people who use it. I work in the software industry, and I don't regularly correspond with a single person whom I know to use PGP.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    It'll be interesting to see whether companies start to shift to using encrypted email over the next few decades - it's not that hard to set up if you know the counterparty will be using encryption of the same kind, and if it's not a service bought in from an external company you can fairly sure it is secure. Companies could at least insist that intra-company email is encrypted, which would be a huge amount of their normal communications, and then extend that outside their boundaries with partners who also accept (say) S/MIME. At present I sign my mails but like you have no clients who use encryption.

JamesArgo 13y ago

Hushmail is a similar service. There's been some speculation that authorities could compel the owners to perform a sort of internal phishing scam to get the passwords.

dmix 13y ago
It's not speculation: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ > a federal prosecution of alleged steroid dealers reveals the Canadian company turned over 12 CDs worth of e-mails from three Hushmail accounts, following a court order obtained through a mutual assistance treaty between the U.S. and Canada.

ry0ohki 13y ago

It seems like the most secure way to send a message these days might be snail mail. While I know the feds to open it from time to time in specific cases, they definitely don't open all.

jes5199 13y ago
no, they don't open the mail, but they scan all the addresses as part of their routing process. We should assume that all postal "metadata" is stored forever.
- gemma 13y ago
  As a veteran of the USPS software industry, I wouldn't worry too much.
  - simonebrunozzi 13y ago
    LOL :)
  - shitgoose 13y ago
    hilarious!! since we on the subject, are there any veterans of NSA software industry who can share some insight?
    - Achshar 13y ago
      I assume they would be under some sort of NDA.
- gsibble 13y ago
  It is: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...
eplanit 13y ago
There is a lot to be said for Snail Mail in that regard. There are far more privacy guarantees (i.e. clearly defined requirements for warrants, and stricter terms) relative to electronic forms of communications.

yajoe 13y ago

Edit: I was a PM on Exchange and Exchange Hosted Encryption for some time, so it looks like Lavabit tried to fight the government on whether they are required to release private keys. I've seen one other customer try to fight, and it was not pretty either. The US government in these cases are serious. Takeaway for fellow hackers: If you are building a system that stores user-generated data, prepare for the eventuality that someone other than the user will demand to see it. In general, the prevailing theory is that all companies are required to release private keys or passwords needed to unlock evidence. As a consequence of Lavabit fighting, they likely got slapped with some pretty harsh contempt of court rulings, including a demand to record all private keys needed for decryption going forward. The worst case (that I can talk about) I saw involved requiring a specific employee be demoted due to improper care of a company's systems. What's sad is that because Lavabit was such a small service provider, they never had the previous rounds of government threats and must have been caught off guard. As I've said in past posts (before Snowden), it is common knowledge among large-scale service providers that the local government can always come in to take a look. Doesn't matter if you are in the US, EU, or China, you have to comply. I've seen the US DOJ threaten pretty harshly a customer who simply asked about 'options' of how to comply. Past post with explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754641 P.S. Right or wrong is a separate conversation...

anoncowherd 13y ago
> P.S. Right or wrong is a separate conversation... No it's not. This is wrong, plain and simple. Wrong is wrong, and black is black.
rdl 13y ago
I think the worst they can realistically do is 1) threaten contempt if you can comply but don't and 2) threaten to disrupt your business operations by seizing servers. There are gag orders on certain legal requests, but you don't have to talk about it to not comply (if you can't comply). As long as you can't comply, I don't think there's an uncounterable risk in the US, since we don't have any key disclosure requirements (the exception being CALEA, which only applies to the PSTN; I'd skip CALEA for an interconnected VOIP system and fight them in the courts/media, personally). Presumably they could put other weird pressure on you like threatening to investigate your nanny's immigration status or whatever, but enh. I still maintain that if you do things properly, you can operate safely in the US while resisting pressure from USG. You can't literally wipe your ass with an NSL in front of the agents, but if you don't have it, and can't get it, they're at worst a DoS. Forcing a provider to implement a huge new logging infrastructure would be an interesting 14A issue, and one could have a system where even that wouldn't recover customer keys. IANAL of course.

toddsiegel 13y ago

The data may have been protected, but the senders and recipients probably were not. Similarly to SSL, it encrypts the traffic, but does not hide which websites you use. I bet that data are still valuable to the government. I have been thinking of starting a business in the privacy space. This has shown me that that all customer data needs to be periodically obliterated in safe way and that a kill switch or nuke button is needed as well to destroy everything on a moment's notice. Where and how to host is a major concern. Cloud, etc., is obviously out of the question.

chmike 13y ago
Apparently a business where some guy is moving paper mail icognito from one point to the ther could be a possible business. I guess lawyers may want this, especially lawyers working to defend issues related to abuse of privacy breach or executive actions. Of course it will be hard to advertise such business. If you'll be trying to keep this secrect by creating small cells of people not knowing each other and smart mailboxes preventing people exchanging t identify each other, you'll become suspect of supporting spying activity. So you better work for the minimal number of clients and charge a lot to remain sustainble. My understanding is that as long as keep the info concentrated in one spot (i.e. Paper mail) it is easy to grab it. If you dilute and spread the info using shared secret and hide it smartly in images or random text, this info would be much harder to catch but could use conventionnal transport means. Extending this idea further, turn the mail network into one big world wide hologram. The information would then be spreaded, available from everywhere, very hard to censor, and private since you need some specific reference signal to extract the info. It's like shared secret. Note however that the need to catch evil people using such communication system for evil means is needed. Just considering our own privacy regardless of what can go wrong with such system is in my opinion selfish. We will always need method to protect against abuses.
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  Reminds me of the plot in the game Mirror's Edge, where couriers would physically deliver data instead of electronically, since there is no way to be sure that it isn't being intercepted. Such a thing might already be in practice already.

wmboy 13y ago

So... there would be market for a secure email service that ran on a ship/vessel that was permanently in the middle of international waters? (might have to have multiple vessel's for redundancy purposes)

freshhawk 13y ago
So guarantee you will be regarded as a "terrorist" and then put yourself somewhere in the middle of international waters? At least when the ship disappeared off the face of the earth it would be easy to figure out what happened.
- woah 13y ago
  Pretty sad world we live in that this is entirely realistic.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - freshhawk 13y ago
    I suppose, but looking at it another way: for the first time in human history we can imagine a world where this wouldn't be the case. We are closer to that world than we've ever been, even if right now the west is moving away from it again.
marcofloriano 13y ago
The Pirate Bay team are implementing something like that, i believe. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Pirate-Bay-Orbit-Serves-Space-Drones,15051.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Pirate-Bay-Orbit-Serves-Spa...
defen 13y ago
IANAAL, but I'm guessing the U.S. would just pressure your flag state to revoke your license. Then they'll arrest you for piracy or something. Or even better issue a letter of marque and reprisal so private citizens can hunt you down and take your stuff.

adrianwaj 13y ago

"encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers" how is that possible? I'm curious to know as to how they achieved that technically. I mean if the user is reading an email in their browser, then it would've had to have been created on the server first.

babby 13y ago
It's just how encryption works; you don't store the plain passwords or keys the users submit to decrypt their stuff, thus you have no way to access it.
cozeulodorieso 13y ago
Lavabit's explanation of their security, via the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com/secure.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com...
rorrr2 13y ago
It all happens on the client side. Servers only store the encrypted emails and have no idea what the contents or the keys are.
- adrianwaj 13y ago
  right, but incoming and outgoing emails from lavabit servers won't necessarily be encrypted, unless the other party is using GPG or whatever - it's just the way they're stored.
- moutarde 13y ago
  The same server(s) also control the JavaScript code run by the client/browser. They could serve special code (to any one the government wanted to spy on) that returned their password to the server.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    That's exactly why LavaBit shut down, looks like they were forced to do that.

easytiger 13y ago

it sounds like they were asked to modify their system to retain data