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The article woefully misunderstands the web security model : > Lavabit’s own privacy policy at the time that Snowden was believed to have been using it stated
by waps 13y ago
The article woefully misunderstands the web security model :
> Lavabit’s own privacy policy at the time that Snowden was believed to have been using it stated that “premium users” would benefit from having their e-mail secured with “an asymmetric encryption process that guarantees that it can’t be accessed by anyone except the holder of the account password. For these accounts, only the encrypted version of the message is ever saved to disk.”
Except, of course, that lavabit is still the only party that controls the code that reads and writes your password, and has the power to replace that code without telling you. Furthermore it doesn't work at all unlesss it's connected to the internet. Updating lavabit's servers to send the password to your mails the first time you access them would be trivial, and well within the powers of the NSA/FBI/...
- anologwintermut 13y agoWorse, Lavabit does get clear text emails when they are received. They encrypted them later. The amount of time later is legally irrelevant because they are now in possession of the data and can be made to hand it over.
- magicalist 13y agoThe only way for that not to be the case is if the sender encrypted it before sending it, at which point you don't need Lavabit anyways.
- alextingle 13y agoBut they are not in a position to hand over communications received prior to the court order. That's the whole point of encrypting received e-mails.
- anologwintermut 13y agoThis is an important distinction, though not iron clad. Lavabit could in theory be ordered to retain records for x days in general. More importantly, though it's obvious to anyone who thinks about how "encrypted" mail works, many people(possibly including Lavabit's founder ... it appears he asserted to the fed's he couldn't give them envelope information) assumed encrypted meant nothing can be handed over ever, even with a court order.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- makomk 13y agoActually, that's not entirely true. Due to a quirk of US law, e-mail in transit has more legal protection than e-mail at rest.