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Help me with this. A) I'm a non dev and b) I'm trying to cut to the chase vs use inflamed terms like Freedom of Speech and Police State. I'm piecing this togeth

Help me with this. A) I'm a non dev and b) I'm trying to cut to the chase vs use inflamed terms like Freedom of Speech and Police State. I'm piecing this together from the few comments I see that trying and get to the core of the issue. i) Lavabit's provided a communication service (email) that was uniquely designed so as the content's literally did not touch their servers. Therefore, if the NSA came to them wanting to look at communications by their users they would literally be told "It's impossible to do that" ii) NSA (or government in general) says "We cannot allow you to have a service that is completely untraceable. You need to begin having a way to trace this. iii) Lavabit's understands that this is their commercial value proposition. Should they be forced to do this they literally go out of business. iv) They fight it hard for a while but realize it's futile so shut up shop vs slowly go out of business. Is that right? As a side note I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the Greenwald/Snowden circular loop. It's very close to a propaganda loop and not all that different to other media outlets who get two like minded people and thus really just have a mutually agreeable conversation vs a reporting role. The danger being of course it's passed off as news by being positioned as such.

dmix 13y ago
> that was uniquely designed so as the content's literally did not touch their servers It only touched their servers in encrypted form, never plaintext. They would have had to wiretap their customer to retrieve content (for example, client side JS monitoring the next time the user accessed their email on the server) since all email was encrypted on the server harddrives and only accessible via the user. Instead if it wasn't encrypted they could have used a normal search warrant which would have given the police access to the plaintext content immediately. What was unique about Lavabit is that they never had the ability to decrypt the content without involving the user, since they never had the "private key".

dmix 13y ago

> that was uniquely designed so as the content's literally did not touch their servers It only touched their servers in encrypted form, never plaintext. They would have had to wiretap their customer to retrieve content (for example, client side JS monitoring the next time the user accessed their email on the server) since all email was encrypted on the server harddrives and only accessible via the user. Instead if it wasn't encrypted they could have used a normal search warrant which would have given the police access to the plaintext content immediately. What was unique about Lavabit is that they never had the ability to decrypt the content without involving the user, since they never had the "private key".