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Thank you for the insights. Why would Levison refuse to comply with the government order and shut down his company? If he was an opportunist, the opportunistic
by sillysaurus3 12y ago
Thank you for the insights. Why would Levison refuse to comply with the government order and shut down his company? If he was an opportunist, the opportunistic action would've been to comply with the secret order while keeping his compliance secret. Users would've continued to trust Lavabit.
- tptacek 12y agoBecause "opportunism" and "principle" exist on spectrums. Opportunism prompted Levison to release a dangerously flawed privacy tool. But once that flaw threatened to compromise Snowden, circumstances crossed the threshold where principle required him to contain the damage he'd done.
- jmathai 12y agoAre there NO alternatives to what Lavabit provided? Even if it required software installation on the client? I have to assume Snowden understood the architecture of a "secure" webmail provider but still went with it. Better than Gmail I'm sure but far from something to rely on.
- tptacek 12y agoThere are lots of alternatives, but none of them involve signing up for a web service and not installing any software. And no, I don't think Lavabit was likely to have been safer than Gmail. Lavabit doesn't have one of the industry's best security teams and largest software security budgets trying to make sure there aren't horrible vulnerabilities in it.