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Ok, let's keep this in perspective. The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals. Targeting individuals i

by 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?
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      That is not impervious: compromise an endpoint. It takes work, but in the course of a serious investigation it can get done. At the limit, Van Eck or similar analog-hole analogues. Anyway, my position is "no, that should not be illegal", though I am not entirely confident in that.
kelnos 13y ago
I disagree with the premise. I don't believe that a service should be required by law to provide the possibility for the government to intercept the activity of its users. You can always say "but the child pornographers!" or, "but the terrorists!"... but... no, sorry. I believe that people should have the ability to engage in total privacy. The fact that the US gov't is doing this because of Snowden (a person I admire) just reinforces my belief.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  > I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy. They already have the ability to do this. That's not what you are asking for. What you are really asking for is: "I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy through any means of communication they so choose."
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Why should privacy be restricted to select mediums?
    - jasonlotito 13y ago
      That's a loaded question and I'm not going to play that game.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Ooookaayyy... I'll try again: Assuming that you don't oppose privacy categorically, do you disagree that "people should have the ability to engage total privacy through any means of communication they so choose." If so, why?
      - polarix 13y ago
        That's a perfectly reasonable question, actually. One possible answer is that communicating on the internet requires the use of a physical commons, which one could reasonably argue carries either innate restrictions or restrictions legitimately imposed by the owners of said infrastructure.
ra 13y ago
"The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals." This is not True. Lavabit made it clear in their TOS that they had no interest in concealing illegality, they complied fully and willingly with all warrants targeting individual users. Their premise was to protect your privacy from untargetted blanket surveillance.
- abalone 13y ago
  What's your source? That conflicts with the New Yorker reporting on the trial proceedings. It also belies common sense, since Lavabit offers a form of encryption that even they cannot decrypt. 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...
  - vidarh 13y ago
    I can't see any part of that article that supports your claim. On the contrary, the article appears to claim that one of the reasons he was resisting so strongly was that handing over the keys would allow full access, though the reporting isn't very clear when it comes to already stored e-mails. From the article: ' On July 25th, Lavabit petitioned to cancel the subpoena and warrant, arguing that if the “government gains access to Lavabit’s Master Key, it will have unlimited access to not only [the account], but all of the communications and data stored in each of Lavabit’s 400,000 e-mail accounts.” Lavabit also asked the court to unseal its records and permit Levison to speak. '
  - ra 13y ago
    My source is (was) the lavabit ToS. I was a paying customer of Lavabit and familiar with their ToS. He made it pretty clear that if you wanted to use his service to hide illegal activity you were SOL. The TOS seems to be long gone. But wikipedia summarises his stance on legit warrants as opposed to "hand over your SSL private key": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
- Zak 13y ago
  I think the issue some people seem to be missing in this discussion is that the technology is morally neutral. A system designed to protect the privacy of its users' data even if its operator is subjected to coercion does not care whether the coercion comes in the form of a court order, a bribe, a threat to reveal a secret or a man holding a gun to the operator's head. A system designed to be secure against coercion of its operator necessarily resists lawful intercepts just as it resists blackmail. Designing a system in such a way does not imply that the designer wishes to promote illegal behavior nor hinder the ability of the police to investigate it.
grecy 13y ago
> 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. Oh come on, don't be so naive. > child pornographers As defined by which country? Is that 16 years old, or 18? Maybe even 21. Just because something is illegal where you are, does not make it illegal in my country/culture. > terrorists actively planning murders And now we know the US Govt actively murders it's own citizens without trial, surely we'd have to count them as terrorists, wouldn't we? (let alone what they do it non-citizens) > missing persons How long does someone have to be "missing" for that to justify the government having unlimited power? Surely they should just kick down everyone's door until they find what they want [1] For every example you come up with, it's trivial to point out that it's an extremely slippery slope. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOvHuojEB4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOvHuojEB4 (etc.)
bigiain 13y ago
"The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals." You say that as though that's the only possible explanation for why the service was designed the way it is. Tarsnap is also - arguably - designed in much the same way. What do you think Colin's response ought to be if the FBI/NSA come to him saying "we think one of your users might be doing $bad_thing, so we want your private keys so we can impersonate you, decrypt anything any of your users have backed up using tarsnap, and undermine the very basis of the business you've built." (note: this is a bit more difficult to execute - they'd need to have some good reason to update the tarsnap software on all end user's machines, since Colin doesn't have the private key my backups are encrypted with…) You say "it's designed to disallow law enforcement certain abilities", I say "it's designed with best-practice modern digital privacy techniques, and is _entirely_ legal, legitimate, and a perfectly good premise to base a business on - and which the government _doesn't_ have the right to claim is 'unlawful', the same as building doorlocks without government skeleton keys, or banksafes without hidden vulnerabilities that the FBI or NSA know about, is also not 'unlawful'". If you want to make privacy illegal - take it to the polls and ask the public if they agree. Until then - designing, deploying, and using well engineered systems to protect your privacy is every citizen's right should they choose to use it. Sure " … some lawful intercepts are justified", but that _doesn't_ imply all systems must be designed in a way that lawful intercepts are possible, and it doesn't give the government the right to coerce people not suspected of illegal acts into destroying their businesses and livelihoods just because they " … didn't trust him to act as a spy on their behalf". That's just _so_ wrong. So _very_ wrong.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
> 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's not true, though. Levison could and did help the government with intercepts before, and offered to provide the same service again; this time, the government was not satisfied with the offer (from the New Yorker, emphasis mine): "The documents, and Levison’s comments to us, suggest that although he is a skeptic, he was willing to work with the government: he offered to write intercept code himself to capture their target’s metadata, and acknowledged that the government might have a right to the person’s information. He was willing to turn that information over, as he did in a case involving child pornography; Lavabit’s archived site in fact explicitly states that one of the reasons its most secure services are available to paying customers only is so that if an account “is used for illegal purposes that money trail can be used to track down the account owner.” But the government refused Levison’s offer. It wanted the keys to everything, so he gave it nothing."
- abalone 13y ago
  Well, it actually is true that the asymmetric encryption feature of the premium Lavabit service is designed to make intercepts impossible. Only the account holder can decrypt it. Handing over account payment information in response to lawful requests is quite a different matter from defeating asymmetric encryption. Account info is unencrypted records that Lavabit has access to in accordance with their TOS. They can turn those over, in accordance to their TOS. Faking out their own service to defeat their own encryption, which they specifically advertised as being only decryptable by the account holder and not Lavabit, is a whole different ballgame. I noted exactly what you stated, that Lavabit offered to help the government implement something like that -- only after being threatened with the "nuclear option" of key seizure. You've got to concede that there's room for some doubt as to whether Lavabit could be trusted to comply with something as extraordinary as that. It would be trusting them to reneg on a specific promise made to all customers about the security of their service, namely that it is impossible for Lavabit to snoop on encrypted communications.
mizchief 13y ago
I totally disagree. People have the right to have private and secure conversations and we shouldn't have to give up that privacy to ensure that the government can spy on our conversations in order to catch bad guys.
darkarmani 13y ago
> 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). I don't understand this conclusion. He cooperated with legal investigations before, he just needed time and resources to implement what they were asking for.
appleflaxen 13y ago
The premise behind your post is incorrect. There is no obligation to create a mechanism for eavesdropping by the government. In other words: if you can design a system to "disallow lawful intercepts of individuals", you are allowed to do so. Or: a lawful intercept is lawful to use, but not legally compelled to exist. The fact that we are so far down the rabbit hole that intelligent technologists like yourself accept this as a premise is incredibly disturbing.
drewcrawford 13y ago
Everybody in this entire debate is just talking past each other. On the pro-government side, the position is something like "We have such a thing as a lawful search warrant, and if you get one you have to comply." Meanwhile on the crypto-anarchist side, the position is something like "We can design a crypto-system that is indifferent to your lawful warrants." But these are really two different arguments, that proceed as follows: the anarchists say "Because X is possible, therefore it should be legal", meanwhile the pro-governmentals say "Because X is required by law, therefore people should do it." But neither of these necessarily follow.
Natsu 13y ago
> The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals. The problem is that computer-mediated communication systems are not able to distinguish between lawful intercepts and unlawful intercepts and thus their security against unlawful intercept is premised on being able to guard against all types of interception, lawful or otherwise.
vargalas 13y ago
Yes, I agree that there are circumstances... But now without case by case decision from a court or whatever the actualy legal system requires. Citizens should be able to protect their privacy and it can be overridden only in those special circumstances and approved by a judge (or whatever the given state requires).
halfninety 13y ago
Isn't any software with a goal of eliminating security holes essentially "specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals"? Should all software providers be forced by law to implement backdoors so that the FBI can intercept its communications, just in case Snowden uses the software?
DennisP 13y ago
PGP is designed to disallow lawful intercepts. Should the government be allowed to prevent strong cryptography software on my own computer? If not, then why should they be allowed to do the same on a hosted service? If so, then is it also ok for oppressive governments in other countries to backdoor cryptography, so they can throw dissidents in prison? Or should dissidents have tools to protect themselves? If they should, then why shouldn't people in this supposedly-free country have the same tools?
ds9 13y ago
abalone : "The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals ... And this is why the government resorted to threatening to seize the keys and trying to impersonate the service." Some of us reject your implication that the government is always entitled to the comms, regardless of harms imposed on innocent parties. Forcibly seizing the means of impersonating someone online, while preventing that person from revealing the fact, is a step too far. It is an injustice against the person impersonated, and wrongly deprives him of reputational integrity, and wrongly deprives others of the value of the service for which they contracted in good faith. Statements like yours attempt to depict the combination of seizing private keys + gag orders as a minor invasion, acceptable in certain cases. In fact it amounts to removal of the basic human right of communicating privately - and as brian_cloutier points out, removes the whole basis of trust online. If the policy is allowed to continue, it removes the ability of cryptography to give an assurance of the identity of any entity online. It is better for a few criminals to go free, if necessary, to preserve more important values (and the government can probably find evidence by other means in most of those cases anyway, and if not, too bad).
cmiles74 13y ago
The premise is incorrect. Lavabit had provided data for lawful intercepts in the past. The government continued to press for unfettered access to all of Lavabit's data which then forced the shutdown. Lavabit offered to develop a more involved solution for the government in order to prevent unfettered access to all of their customer's data. The court's assertion that the government could trust Lavabit because Lavabit didn't trust the government is both childish and assinine. Source: same article as parent post.
Datsundere 13y ago
Did you mean UNLAWFUL intercepts of individuals? There are no lawful intercepts between two private parties. Do you get to hear everything about a deal between two big corporations other than the stuff released in the press? Go to a retail store and ask for information about an employer. They don't give out any information (unless there is a probable cause of course). The only time government can intervene is when a 3rd party is hurt by someone. In this case it's their own fault for snooping around and reading everyone's private conversations and some of there were used for stalking hot girls! and now they're acting like kids trying to force lavabit by threatening the owner.

by abalone 13y ago

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?
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    That is not impervious: compromise an endpoint. It takes work, but in the course of a serious investigation it can get done. At the limit, Van Eck or similar analog-hole analogues. Anyway, my position is "no, that should not be illegal", though I am not entirely confident in that.

kelnos 13y ago

I disagree with the premise. I don't believe that a service should be required by law to provide the possibility for the government to intercept the activity of its users. You can always say "but the child pornographers!" or, "but the terrorists!"... but... no, sorry. I believe that people should have the ability to engage in total privacy. The fact that the US gov't is doing this because of Snowden (a person I admire) just reinforces my belief.

jasonlotito 13y ago
> I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy. They already have the ability to do this. That's not what you are asking for. What you are really asking for is: "I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy through any means of communication they so choose."
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Why should privacy be restricted to select mediums?
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    That's a loaded question and I'm not going to play that game.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Ooookaayyy... I'll try again: Assuming that you don't oppose privacy categorically, do you disagree that "people should have the ability to engage total privacy through any means of communication they so choose." If so, why?
    - polarix 13y ago
      That's a perfectly reasonable question, actually. One possible answer is that communicating on the internet requires the use of a physical commons, which one could reasonably argue carries either innate restrictions or restrictions legitimately imposed by the owners of said infrastructure.

ra 13y ago

"The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals." This is not True. Lavabit made it clear in their TOS that they had no interest in concealing illegality, they complied fully and willingly with all warrants targeting individual users. Their premise was to protect your privacy from untargetted blanket surveillance.

abalone 13y ago
What's your source? That conflicts with the New Yorker reporting on the trial proceedings. It also belies common sense, since Lavabit offers a form of encryption that even they cannot decrypt. 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...
- vidarh 13y ago
  I can't see any part of that article that supports your claim. On the contrary, the article appears to claim that one of the reasons he was resisting so strongly was that handing over the keys would allow full access, though the reporting isn't very clear when it comes to already stored e-mails. From the article: ' On July 25th, Lavabit petitioned to cancel the subpoena and warrant, arguing that if the “government gains access to Lavabit’s Master Key, it will have unlimited access to not only [the account], but all of the communications and data stored in each of Lavabit’s 400,000 e-mail accounts.” Lavabit also asked the court to unseal its records and permit Levison to speak. '
- ra 13y ago
  My source is (was) the lavabit ToS. I was a paying customer of Lavabit and familiar with their ToS. He made it pretty clear that if you wanted to use his service to hide illegal activity you were SOL. The TOS seems to be long gone. But wikipedia summarises his stance on legit warrants as opposed to "hand over your SSL private key": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
Zak 13y ago
I think the issue some people seem to be missing in this discussion is that the technology is morally neutral. A system designed to protect the privacy of its users' data even if its operator is subjected to coercion does not care whether the coercion comes in the form of a court order, a bribe, a threat to reveal a secret or a man holding a gun to the operator's head. A system designed to be secure against coercion of its operator necessarily resists lawful intercepts just as it resists blackmail. Designing a system in such a way does not imply that the designer wishes to promote illegal behavior nor hinder the ability of the police to investigate it.

grecy 13y ago

> 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. Oh come on, don't be so naive. > child pornographers As defined by which country? Is that 16 years old, or 18? Maybe even 21. Just because something is illegal where you are, does not make it illegal in my country/culture. > terrorists actively planning murders And now we know the US Govt actively murders it's own citizens without trial, surely we'd have to count them as terrorists, wouldn't we? (let alone what they do it non-citizens) > missing persons How long does someone have to be "missing" for that to justify the government having unlimited power? Surely they should just kick down everyone's door until they find what they want [1] For every example you come up with, it's trivial to point out that it's an extremely slippery slope. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOvHuojEB4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOvHuojEB4 (etc.)

bigiain 13y ago

"The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals." You say that as though that's the only possible explanation for why the service was designed the way it is. Tarsnap is also - arguably - designed in much the same way. What do you think Colin's response ought to be if the FBI/NSA come to him saying "we think one of your users might be doing $bad_thing, so we want your private keys so we can impersonate you, decrypt anything any of your users have backed up using tarsnap, and undermine the very basis of the business you've built." (note: this is a bit more difficult to execute - they'd need to have some good reason to update the tarsnap software on all end user's machines, since Colin doesn't have the private key my backups are encrypted with…) You say "it's designed to disallow law enforcement certain abilities", I say "it's designed with best-practice modern digital privacy techniques, and is _entirely_ legal, legitimate, and a perfectly good premise to base a business on - and which the government _doesn't_ have the right to claim is 'unlawful', the same as building doorlocks without government skeleton keys, or banksafes without hidden vulnerabilities that the FBI or NSA know about, is also not 'unlawful'". If you want to make privacy illegal - take it to the polls and ask the public if they agree. Until then - designing, deploying, and using well engineered systems to protect your privacy is every citizen's right should they choose to use it. Sure " … some lawful intercepts are justified", but that _doesn't_ imply all systems must be designed in a way that lawful intercepts are possible, and it doesn't give the government the right to coerce people not suspected of illegal acts into destroying their businesses and livelihoods just because they " … didn't trust him to act as a spy on their behalf". That's just _so_ wrong. So _very_ wrong.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

> 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's not true, though. Levison could and did help the government with intercepts before, and offered to provide the same service again; this time, the government was not satisfied with the offer (from the New Yorker, emphasis mine): "The documents, and Levison’s comments to us, suggest that although he is a skeptic, he was willing to work with the government: he offered to write intercept code himself to capture their target’s metadata, and acknowledged that the government might have a right to the person’s information. He was willing to turn that information over, as he did in a case involving child pornography; Lavabit’s archived site in fact explicitly states that one of the reasons its most secure services are available to paying customers only is so that if an account “is used for illegal purposes that money trail can be used to track down the account owner.” But the government refused Levison’s offer. It wanted the keys to everything, so he gave it nothing."

abalone 13y ago
Well, it actually is true that the asymmetric encryption feature of the premium Lavabit service is designed to make intercepts impossible. Only the account holder can decrypt it. Handing over account payment information in response to lawful requests is quite a different matter from defeating asymmetric encryption. Account info is unencrypted records that Lavabit has access to in accordance with their TOS. They can turn those over, in accordance to their TOS. Faking out their own service to defeat their own encryption, which they specifically advertised as being only decryptable by the account holder and not Lavabit, is a whole different ballgame. I noted exactly what you stated, that Lavabit offered to help the government implement something like that -- only after being threatened with the "nuclear option" of key seizure. You've got to concede that there's room for some doubt as to whether Lavabit could be trusted to comply with something as extraordinary as that. It would be trusting them to reneg on a specific promise made to all customers about the security of their service, namely that it is impossible for Lavabit to snoop on encrypted communications.

mizchief 13y ago

I totally disagree. People have the right to have private and secure conversations and we shouldn't have to give up that privacy to ensure that the government can spy on our conversations in order to catch bad guys.

darkarmani 13y ago

> 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). I don't understand this conclusion. He cooperated with legal investigations before, he just needed time and resources to implement what they were asking for.

appleflaxen 13y ago

The premise behind your post is incorrect. There is no obligation to create a mechanism for eavesdropping by the government. In other words: if you can design a system to "disallow lawful intercepts of individuals", you are allowed to do so. Or: a lawful intercept is lawful to use, but not legally compelled to exist. The fact that we are so far down the rabbit hole that intelligent technologists like yourself accept this as a premise is incredibly disturbing.

drewcrawford 13y ago

Everybody in this entire debate is just talking past each other. On the pro-government side, the position is something like "We have such a thing as a lawful search warrant, and if you get one you have to comply." Meanwhile on the crypto-anarchist side, the position is something like "We can design a crypto-system that is indifferent to your lawful warrants." But these are really two different arguments, that proceed as follows: the anarchists say "Because X is possible, therefore it should be legal", meanwhile the pro-governmentals say "Because X is required by law, therefore people should do it." But neither of these necessarily follow.

Natsu 13y ago

> The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals. The problem is that computer-mediated communication systems are not able to distinguish between lawful intercepts and unlawful intercepts and thus their security against unlawful intercept is premised on being able to guard against all types of interception, lawful or otherwise.

vargalas 13y ago

Yes, I agree that there are circumstances... But now without case by case decision from a court or whatever the actualy legal system requires. Citizens should be able to protect their privacy and it can be overridden only in those special circumstances and approved by a judge (or whatever the given state requires).

halfninety 13y ago

Isn't any software with a goal of eliminating security holes essentially "specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals"? Should all software providers be forced by law to implement backdoors so that the FBI can intercept its communications, just in case Snowden uses the software?

DennisP 13y ago

PGP is designed to disallow lawful intercepts. Should the government be allowed to prevent strong cryptography software on my own computer? If not, then why should they be allowed to do the same on a hosted service? If so, then is it also ok for oppressive governments in other countries to backdoor cryptography, so they can throw dissidents in prison? Or should dissidents have tools to protect themselves? If they should, then why shouldn't people in this supposedly-free country have the same tools?

ds9 13y ago

abalone : "The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals ... And this is why the government resorted to threatening to seize the keys and trying to impersonate the service." Some of us reject your implication that the government is always entitled to the comms, regardless of harms imposed on innocent parties. Forcibly seizing the means of impersonating someone online, while preventing that person from revealing the fact, is a step too far. It is an injustice against the person impersonated, and wrongly deprives him of reputational integrity, and wrongly deprives others of the value of the service for which they contracted in good faith. Statements like yours attempt to depict the combination of seizing private keys + gag orders as a minor invasion, acceptable in certain cases. In fact it amounts to removal of the basic human right of communicating privately - and as brian_cloutier points out, removes the whole basis of trust online. If the policy is allowed to continue, it removes the ability of cryptography to give an assurance of the identity of any entity online. It is better for a few criminals to go free, if necessary, to preserve more important values (and the government can probably find evidence by other means in most of those cases anyway, and if not, too bad).

cmiles74 13y ago

The premise is incorrect. Lavabit had provided data for lawful intercepts in the past. The government continued to press for unfettered access to all of Lavabit's data which then forced the shutdown. Lavabit offered to develop a more involved solution for the government in order to prevent unfettered access to all of their customer's data. The court's assertion that the government could trust Lavabit because Lavabit didn't trust the government is both childish and assinine. Source: same article as parent post.

Datsundere 13y ago

Did you mean UNLAWFUL intercepts of individuals? There are no lawful intercepts between two private parties. Do you get to hear everything about a deal between two big corporations other than the stuff released in the press? Go to a retail store and ask for information about an employer. They don't give out any information (unless there is a probable cause of course). The only time government can intervene is when a 3rd party is hurt by someone. In this case it's their own fault for snooping around and reading everyone's private conversations and some of there were used for stalking hot girls! and now they're acting like kids trying to force lavabit by threatening the owner.