wolfigor
Emperor
Ladar Levison is the founder of Lavabit a secure email system that was used Edward Snowden (I guess you all know who is this guy).
Background (from wikipedia):
However Ladar Levison was prevented by a secret court order from revealing anything about the case... even to his own lawyer!
Courts documents are revealing some details of what happened:
In August, Ladar Levinson shut down Lavabit, his security-minded email business, rather than comply with government demands that he claimed would have made him "complicit in crimes against the American people."
At the time, a gag order prevented him from discussing the details of his situation. But court documents unsealed on Wednesday reveal that the FBI wanted Levinson to hand over encryption keys that would have given federal agents "real time" access to not just Snowden's account, but the accounts of all 40,000 of Lavabit's customers.
Ladar Levison was not against allowing NSA to access Snowden email according to lawful interception laws.
But the NSA requested a key allowing decrypted access to all 40,000 users, compromising the integrity and security of everybody private mail.
To Levinson, that was going too far: "You don't need to bug an entire city to bug one guy's phone calls"; the key would have given agents up-to-the-minute access to the emails of every Lavabit user.
Levinson complied with the letter of the order, but he delivered the encryption keys as strings of numbers printed out on paper, rather than as electronic files. What's more, he intentionally printed them in a font designed to be hard to scan, one prosecutors described as "largely illegible."
This is the stuff of legend!
After that he had to fold to don't be jailed himself and closed down the service (which was based on a security now secretly compromised)
Pleased read the full article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/03/lavabit_snowden_investigation_details/
He was ready to respect the law and now bend-over to an unjust request.
Instead of continuing to provide a service which was compromised he preferred to stop it losing his main source of income but not his integrity and reputation.
The SSL key printed as 45 pages of random and scarcely legible characters is only the icing on the cake.
Background (from wikipedia):
However Ladar Levison was prevented by a secret court order from revealing anything about the case... even to his own lawyer!
Courts documents are revealing some details of what happened:
In August, Ladar Levinson shut down Lavabit, his security-minded email business, rather than comply with government demands that he claimed would have made him "complicit in crimes against the American people."
At the time, a gag order prevented him from discussing the details of his situation. But court documents unsealed on Wednesday reveal that the FBI wanted Levinson to hand over encryption keys that would have given federal agents "real time" access to not just Snowden's account, but the accounts of all 40,000 of Lavabit's customers.
Ladar Levison was not against allowing NSA to access Snowden email according to lawful interception laws.
But the NSA requested a key allowing decrypted access to all 40,000 users, compromising the integrity and security of everybody private mail.
To Levinson, that was going too far: "You don't need to bug an entire city to bug one guy's phone calls"; the key would have given agents up-to-the-minute access to the emails of every Lavabit user.
Levinson complied with the letter of the order, but he delivered the encryption keys as strings of numbers printed out on paper, rather than as electronic files. What's more, he intentionally printed them in a font designed to be hard to scan, one prosecutors described as "largely illegible."
This is the stuff of legend!
After that he had to fold to don't be jailed himself and closed down the service (which was based on a security now secretly compromised)
Pleased read the full article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/03/lavabit_snowden_investigation_details/
He was ready to respect the law and now bend-over to an unjust request.
Instead of continuing to provide a service which was compromised he preferred to stop it losing his main source of income but not his integrity and reputation.
The SSL key printed as 45 pages of random and scarcely legible characters is only the icing on the cake.
that's great
