The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people."
Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance.
"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," founder Ladar Levison wrote on the company's website, reported by Xeni Jardin the popular news site Boing Boing.
Levison said government-imposed restrictions prevented him from explaining what exactly led to his company's crisis point.
"I feel you deserve to know what's going on – the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this," Levison wrote. "Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests."
Privacy advocates called the move unprecedented. "I am unaware of any situation in which a service provider chose to shut down rather than comply with a court order they felt violated the Constitution," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Silent Circle, another provider of secure online services, announced on Thursday night that it would scrap its own encrypted email offering, Silent Mail. In a blogpost the company said that although it had not received any government orders to hand over information, "the writing is on the wall".
Several technology companies that participate in the National Security Agency's surveillance dragnets have filed legal requests to lift the secrecy restrictions that prevent them from explaining to their customers precisely what it is that they provide to the powerful intelligence service – either wittingly or due to a court order. Yahoo has sued for the disclosure of some of those court orders.
The presiding judge of the secret court that issues such orders, known as the Fisa court, has indicated to the Justice Department that he expects declassification in the Yahoo case. The department agreed last week to a review that will last into September about the issues surrounding the release of that information.
There are few internet and telecommunications companies known to have refused compliance with the NSA for its bulk surveillance efforts, which the NSA and the Obama administration assert are vital to protect Americans. One of them is Qwest Communications, whose former CEO Joseph Nacchio – convicted of insider trading – alleged that the government rejected it for lucrative contracts after Qwest became a rare holdout for post-9/11 surveillance.
"Without the companies' participation," former NSA codebreaker William Binney recently told the Guardian, "it would reduce the collection capability of the NSA significantly."
Snowden was allegedly a Lavabit customer. A Lavabit email address believed to come from Snowden invited reporters to a press conferenceat Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport in mid-July.
While Levinson did not say much about the shuttering of his company – he notably did not refer to the NSA, for instance – he did say he intended to mount a legal challenge.
"We've already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals," Levinson wrote. "A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company."
He continued: "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."
Opsahl noted that the fact that Levinson was appealing a case before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals indicated the government had a court order for Lavabit's data.
"It's taking a very bold stand, one that I'm sure will have financial ramifications," Opsahl said.
"There should be more transparency around this. There's probably no harm to the national security of the United States to have it publicly revealed what are the legal issues here," Opsahl continued.
The justice department said it had no comment to make. Representatives from the NSA, White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/lavabit-email-shut-down-edward-snowden?INTCMP=SRCH
Published: August 9, 2013 12:32 IST | Updated: August 9, 2013 15:19 IST
Encrypted email service linked to Snowden shuts down
A Texas-based email service reportedly used by National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden said it was shutting down on Thursday, explaining in a cryptic message that it would rather go out of business than “become complicit in crimes against the American people.”
The statement posted online by Lavabit owner Ladar Levison hinted that the Dallas-based company had been forbidden from revealing what was going on.
“I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision,” Mr. Levison’s statement said. “As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.”
The post didn’t name Mr. Snowden or refer to any particular investigation, but the statement’s timing and other material in the public domain suggest that Mr. Lavabit shut down in protest at the US government’s pursuit of the 30-year-old whistleblower, whose disclosures have blown the lid off the NSA’s secret domestic surveillance.
Lavabit might have been attractive to Mr. Snowden because the company advertised itself as a secure, privacy-conscious alternative to webmail services operated by Yahoo and Google. The company’s promotional material it has since been pulled from the internet said Lavabit’s system was specifically designed to resist secret requests from US law enforcement.
Mr. Levison’s statement said the firm had launched a legal defence fund and was preparing to go to court to “resurrect Lavabit as an American company.”
Published: August 7, 2013 01:38 IST | Updated: August 7, 2013 15:48 IST
Who wants to be a whistle-blower?
The verdict against Bradley Manning leaves troubling questions about the Obama administration’s continuing belligerence not just towards free journalism but freedom itself
When the verdict was announced in the trial of army intelligence officer Bradley Manning last week, it became clear that it was a dangerous business to draw the world’s attention to the darker side of U.S. military and diplomatic engagement in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
A few rows behind me in the military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, a gaggle of Manning supporters wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the word “truth” sat in stunned silence as Judge Denise Lind read out the word “guilty” several times.
Of the 22 charges he faced. Mr. Manning was convicted on 17, six of which were under the 1917 Espionage Act. That leaves him with a potential 136-year term in jail. The sentence is to be pronounced later this month.
However, despite the Obama administration’s breathtakingly aggressive prosecution of Mr. Manning for passing on 7,50,000 war logs, diplomatic cables and other classified government information to WikiLeaks, the judge found the soldier not guilty on two important counts.
The first relates to the serious allegation that he “aided the enemy,” for all practical purposes al-Qaeda, and the second, to the allegation that he leaked an encrypted copy of a damning video of the U.S. military conducting a lethal aerial attack in Afghanistan’s Farah province, in which many civilians were killed.
In finding Mr. Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy — in other words exonerating him of treason punishable by death — Judge Lind showed the forbearance to not give in to pressure to fuel what is now widely acknowledged as the Obama administration’s “War on Leaks.”
Administration’s war
This war, carried out in the shadows of well-crafted legal protections — and not dissimilar in that regard to the secrecy-shrouded drone assassination programme on distant shores — has recently spilled media blood by applying gag orders, telephone record taps, defamation-type litigation and behind the scenes bullying.
The intensity of the White House’s battle against critics of surveillance became evident in May, when the Associated Press’s Chief Executive, Gary Pruitt, penned a strongly-worded letter to Attorney-General Eric Holder saying that he objected to the “massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities” of the AP.
He specifically referenced the Justice Department’s secret review of phone records for more than 20 separate telephone lines. Mr. Holder defended that surveillance on the grounds of endangering national security.
Since that episode, the U.S. House of Representatives opened a perjury inquiry against Mr. Holder to examine whether he fudged a statement to Congress about the Obama administration’s proclivity to press criminal charges against whistle-blowers.
Specifically, the House demanded to know whether Mr. Holder tried to prosecute Fox News journalist James Rosen for publishing classified information in a 2009 report on Iran, going so far as to label Mr. Rosen a potential “co-conspirator” in a bid to get court approval for surveillance.
In the ongoing saga of the prosecution — it is tempting to call it persecution — of former Central Intelligence Agency agent Jeffrey Sterling, charged with sharing classified information with The New York Times journalist James Risen, the government offered a similar logic.
The Justice Department has argued that leaks to the press were even “more pernicious” than true espionage involving the sale of secrets to enemies because not one, but “every foreign adversary stood to benefit from the defendant's unauthorised disclosure.” According to the Times, Mr. Risen has vowed to go to prison rather than testify about his sources.
More recently, the case of Edward Snowden, the former contractor to the National Security Agency (NSA) and the man behind the revelations on the NSA’s mass automated surveillance of Internet communications, has exposed the double standards of the U.S. government in dealing with leaks — fiercely prosecuting those that generate challenges to the surveillance state’s standard operating procedure and softly facilitating those that improve its public standing.
The deeper question that the administration is only grudgingly beginning to acknowledge, and not until Congress threatened to defund NSA spying programmes authorised by the shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, is whether the legal checks and balances aimed at limiting government surveillance are sufficiently robust and transparent.
In this regard, both the verdict against Mr. Manning as well as the treatment meted out to him by the military since his May 2010 arrest leave troubling, unanswered questions about the Obama administration’s continuing belligerence towards not only free journalism in this country but freedom itself.
Judge Lind’s decision to hand out a guilty verdict under six Espionage Act charges has been described by numerous experts as a move that would have a “chilling effect” across the board and discourage future whistle-blowers who obtain classified documents that could expose illicit conduct in public offices.
Despite Mr. Manning admitting guilt to 10 lesser charges that carried a total of 20 years imprisonment, the government has also appeared keen to make an example of him and not permit him anything less than life imprisonment — this after he already endured 1,160 days of pretrial detention in a six-foot by 12-foot cell for months, deprived of sleep, forced to stand naked, and placed on suicide watch despite experts suggesting that was unnecessary.
No traitor
If Osama bin Laden’s intention behind the 9/11 attacks was to plunge the U.S. into a vicious cycle of paranoia fuelling the dilution of civil liberties and constitutional rights, it would appear that under Barack Obama’s reign, the dead terror chief’s cherished goals have been achieved.
The last hope for the return of genuine freedom of speech and the press, including a recasting of FISA, and Patriot Act-type provisions, may be the disenchantment of a growing minority of Americans who repudiate Mr. Obama’s counter-terrorism-based overreach. According to a Quinnipiac national poll released on August 1, American voters said 55-34 per cent that Mr. Snowden is a whistle-blower and not a traitor.