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Lavabit has revealed something incredibly important. The US Government has no problem with seizing your private keys. It claims the right to impersonate you wi

Lavabit has revealed something incredibly important. The US Government has no problem with seizing your private keys. It claims the right to impersonate you without your permission. It no longer matters which system you use, Sovereign Keys, PGP web-of-trust, traditional PKI, they're all the same. Services based in the US can be MITM'd without leaving any traces. If this is allowed to continue uncontested there will no be no way to stay secure online. The only solution is a partial solution, to create decentralized services. This, at least, will require the government to seize the private keys of each individual they want to track.

dobbsbob 13y ago
The only way to stop this is to dismantle the police state. We have no chance of keeping up with their anti-privacy arms race
- kordless 13y ago
  Let's replace them with an app while they are in halt mode.
anologwintermut 13y ago
The government already got to seize private keys when they got search warrants and ceased servers. I'd imagine this is the case in all of Western Europe.
- xyzzyz 13y ago
  Yes, but they weren't able to use them for MITM attacks, as seizing servers either equaled to shutting down a service, or allowed service operator to change the keys, so seized keys were useless. Now they feel they have right to obtain the private keys for you, and impose a gag order, so that you cannot change the compromised key. I doubt that significant amount (if any) of western European countries are able to force you to keep using compromised private key, and keep you silent about this using a gag order.
joe_the_user 13y ago
Well, we knew the US government didn't mind seizing whatever under some circumstances. What we know specifically now is that the government is inclined to "err" on the side of taking everything to the point that it would take your private SSL keys if it happen to get a warrant for your shopping list. The state has generally arrogated itself similar powers in physical searches so the news is that it just gets worse with data searches.
- n09n 13y ago
  That doesn't seem like the right interpretation. They asked for this because Lavabit was unable, or possibly unwilling, to turn over Snowden's records, and impersonating Lavabit the next time he tried to check his email would have been the only way to get that info. So yes, if your shopping list can't be recovered without your private SSL keys, they will take those when they have a warrant for your shopping list.
  - benregenspan 13y ago
    According to the New Yorker piece on Lavabit yesterday (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-lavabit-edward-snowden-email-service-melted-down.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-l...), the owner was willing to add code tailored to tracing only Snowden's (or whoever it belonged to) account. The FBI turned him down and demanded the less surgical option.
    - wbl 13y ago
      Only after he refused to do it initially. Read the case file: it's not hard and has a lot of detail reporters miss.
    - MustBeAShill 13y ago
      ...and a solution that would fail to preserve the chain of evidence. If there's a black box at any point, e.g. Levison produces information and emails it to the investigating officers, the doctrine of "fruit of the poisoned tree" applies.
gcb1 13y ago
something even more important... they do not tap email. or they are stuborn as hell and took that personally. think about it... what does it even matter that lavabit exists?!? email is plain text. they already have ATT and verizon in their bed. they could tap that plain text anywhere. unless all the parties ever only used decent MX i think...
- anologwintermut 13y ago
  The original order wasn't for SSL keys or even Snowden's emails, it was for the envelope information and the IPs he was connecting from (see page 4 of http://cryptome.org/2013/10/lavabit-orders.pdf http://cryptome.org/2013/10/lavabit-orders.pdf) They wanted data on where Snowden was and who he was communicating with. Snowden uses PGP on top of Lavabit and presummably connecting to Lavabit securely. So at least to get his IP address, they needed Lavabit's cooperation or, baring that, the SSL keys. It's a heavey handed approach, but not irrational.
orblivion 13y ago
Explain to me how a PGP web-of-trust can be MITM'd? Presumably you exchange keys in person?
- aianus 13y ago
  The govt coerces somebody you trust (either directly or through the web of trust) to hand over their private keys and then begins impersonating them.
  - orblivion 13y ago
    Well, this was circumvented here, right? The guy revoked his cert. That's what revocation is for. I guess the next step is a secret law that makes this illegal?
    - aianus 13y ago
      Or they detain you so you can't revoke it
      - dobbsbob 13y ago
        The intelligence court can if wants dish out secret punishment, so according to the Washington Post if they find you in contempt you will be held in a communications management unit, which is basically max security where they put terrorists. You are forbidden from ever talking to anybody while inside and nobody can know you are there, because it would leak the national security secrets of the specific case so basically the secret police make you vanish off the face of the earth until you cooperate. How did this become legal
  - orblivion 13y ago
    Also, honestly, the govt could coerce you into being a mole for that matter, right?
  - tedks 13y ago
    Crypto is no substitute for tradecraft.
abalone 13y ago
Ok, let's keep this in perspective. The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals. Targeting individuals is absolutely the right way to go about a lawful intercept. Sucking up all traffic like the NSA has been doing is totally overbroad and invasive. But the whole point of the asymmetric encryption feature of Lavabit was to make it impossible for anyone but the account holder to access their email. This is obviously why Snowden used the service. Duh. And this is why the government resorted to threatening to seize the keys and trying to impersonate the service. What actually happened is, in the court proceedings Lavabit responded to this by offering to make modifications to the service to essentially wiretap an individual account without handing over the keys. Thus confirming the problem the government faced. But by this point the government didn't trust him to act as a spy on their behalf (which frankly is not an unreasonable assumption). To be absolutely clear, I am taking no position on the justness of the government's targeting of Snowden. Personally I think he's a hero. But surely we can all agree there exist circumstances under which some lawful intercepts are justified: child pornographers, terrorists actively planning murders, missing persons, etc. The problem is Lavabit was not designed to facilitate intercepts under any circumstances. That is why the keys were seized. Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-lavabit-edward-snowden-email-service-melted-down.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-l...
- Zigurd 13y ago
  > But surely we can all agree there exist circumstances under which some lawful intercepts are justified Perhaps, but there are means of communication that are impervious to interception, and that cannot be compromised the way Lavabit might have been. Should such technologies be outlawed?
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Impervious?
    - Zigurd 13y ago
      Sure: Strong encryption and ephemeral keys. The only thing to do in that situation is to compromise one of the communicating parties. If the communicating parties have arranged a safeword to signal they have been compromised, even that technique is useless. In the case of Snowden and Greenwald, that wasn't going to happen. It is possible to make storage and communication immune to surveillance. So I ask: should that be illegal?
Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> Lavabit has revealed something incredibly important. That Ladar Levison is incompetent. The FBI should probably have beat him to death in an alley for fraud. Because whatever the FBI can do with a search warrant, we must assume the mafia has already done with a rubber hose. In fact, if we apply the parent comment's raving paranoia to the whole system, we find that Levison wept for joy because the FBI was giving him a way to publicly throw in the towel and retire from his mob involvement. If Levison had been competent, instead of putting on a TSA-style security theater, he would have been using tamper-detecting self-erasing computers, jurisdictional redundancy, pre-distributed certificate revocation lists, etc. TL,DR: he did this to himself by not following NSA standards.

dobbsbob 13y ago

The only way to stop this is to dismantle the police state. We have no chance of keeping up with their anti-privacy arms race

kordless 13y ago
Let's replace them with an app while they are in halt mode.

anologwintermut 13y ago

The government already got to seize private keys when they got search warrants and ceased servers. I'd imagine this is the case in all of Western Europe.

xyzzyz 13y ago
Yes, but they weren't able to use them for MITM attacks, as seizing servers either equaled to shutting down a service, or allowed service operator to change the keys, so seized keys were useless. Now they feel they have right to obtain the private keys for you, and impose a gag order, so that you cannot change the compromised key. I doubt that significant amount (if any) of western European countries are able to force you to keep using compromised private key, and keep you silent about this using a gag order.

joe_the_user 13y ago

Well, we knew the US government didn't mind seizing whatever under some circumstances. What we know specifically now is that the government is inclined to "err" on the side of taking everything to the point that it would take your private SSL keys if it happen to get a warrant for your shopping list. The state has generally arrogated itself similar powers in physical searches so the news is that it just gets worse with data searches.

n09n 13y ago
That doesn't seem like the right interpretation. They asked for this because Lavabit was unable, or possibly unwilling, to turn over Snowden's records, and impersonating Lavabit the next time he tried to check his email would have been the only way to get that info. So yes, if your shopping list can't be recovered without your private SSL keys, they will take those when they have a warrant for your shopping list.
- benregenspan 13y ago
  According to the New Yorker piece on Lavabit yesterday (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-lavabit-edward-snowden-email-service-melted-down.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-l...), the owner was willing to add code tailored to tracing only Snowden's (or whoever it belonged to) account. The FBI turned him down and demanded the less surgical option.
  - wbl 13y ago
    Only after he refused to do it initially. Read the case file: it's not hard and has a lot of detail reporters miss.
  - MustBeAShill 13y ago
    ...and a solution that would fail to preserve the chain of evidence. If there's a black box at any point, e.g. Levison produces information and emails it to the investigating officers, the doctrine of "fruit of the poisoned tree" applies.

gcb1 13y ago

something even more important... they do not tap email. or they are stuborn as hell and took that personally. think about it... what does it even matter that lavabit exists?!? email is plain text. they already have ATT and verizon in their bed. they could tap that plain text anywhere. unless all the parties ever only used decent MX i think...

anologwintermut 13y ago
The original order wasn't for SSL keys or even Snowden's emails, it was for the envelope information and the IPs he was connecting from (see page 4 of http://cryptome.org/2013/10/lavabit-orders.pdf http://cryptome.org/2013/10/lavabit-orders.pdf) They wanted data on where Snowden was and who he was communicating with. Snowden uses PGP on top of Lavabit and presummably connecting to Lavabit securely. So at least to get his IP address, they needed Lavabit's cooperation or, baring that, the SSL keys. It's a heavey handed approach, but not irrational.

orblivion 13y ago

Explain to me how a PGP web-of-trust can be MITM'd? Presumably you exchange keys in person?

aianus 13y ago
The govt coerces somebody you trust (either directly or through the web of trust) to hand over their private keys and then begins impersonating them.
- orblivion 13y ago
  Well, this was circumvented here, right? The guy revoked his cert. That's what revocation is for. I guess the next step is a secret law that makes this illegal?
  - aianus 13y ago
    Or they detain you so you can't revoke it
    - dobbsbob 13y ago
      The intelligence court can if wants dish out secret punishment, so according to the Washington Post if they find you in contempt you will be held in a communications management unit, which is basically max security where they put terrorists. You are forbidden from ever talking to anybody while inside and nobody can know you are there, because it would leak the national security secrets of the specific case so basically the secret police make you vanish off the face of the earth until you cooperate. How did this become legal
- orblivion 13y ago
  Also, honestly, the govt could coerce you into being a mole for that matter, right?
- tedks 13y ago
  Crypto is no substitute for tradecraft.

abalone 13y ago

Ok, let's keep this in perspective. The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals. Targeting individuals is absolutely the right way to go about a lawful intercept. Sucking up all traffic like the NSA has been doing is totally overbroad and invasive. But the whole point of the asymmetric encryption feature of Lavabit was to make it impossible for anyone but the account holder to access their email. This is obviously why Snowden used the service. Duh. And this is why the government resorted to threatening to seize the keys and trying to impersonate the service. What actually happened is, in the court proceedings Lavabit responded to this by offering to make modifications to the service to essentially wiretap an individual account without handing over the keys. Thus confirming the problem the government faced. But by this point the government didn't trust him to act as a spy on their behalf (which frankly is not an unreasonable assumption). To be absolutely clear, I am taking no position on the justness of the government's targeting of Snowden. Personally I think he's a hero. But surely we can all agree there exist circumstances under which some lawful intercepts are justified: child pornographers, terrorists actively planning murders, missing persons, etc. The problem is Lavabit was not designed to facilitate intercepts under any circumstances. That is why the keys were seized. Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-lavabit-edward-snowden-email-service-melted-down.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-l...

Zigurd 13y ago
> But surely we can all agree there exist circumstances under which some lawful intercepts are justified Perhaps, but there are means of communication that are impervious to interception, and that cannot be compromised the way Lavabit might have been. Should such technologies be outlawed?
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Impervious?
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    Sure: Strong encryption and ephemeral keys. The only thing to do in that situation is to compromise one of the communicating parties. If the communicating parties have arranged a safeword to signal they have been compromised, even that technique is useless. In the case of Snowden and Greenwald, that wasn't going to happen. It is possible to make storage and communication immune to surveillance. So I ask: should that be illegal?

Daniel_Newby 13y ago

> Lavabit has revealed something incredibly important. That Ladar Levison is incompetent. The FBI should probably have beat him to death in an alley for fraud. Because whatever the FBI can do with a search warrant, we must assume the mafia has already done with a rubber hose. In fact, if we apply the parent comment's raving paranoia to the whole system, we find that Levison wept for joy because the FBI was giving him a way to publicly throw in the towel and retire from his mob involvement. If Levison had been competent, instead of putting on a TSA-style security theater, he would have been using tamper-detecting self-erasing computers, jurisdictional redundancy, pre-distributed certificate revocation lists, etc. TL,DR: he did this to himself by not following NSA standards.