Ladar Levison told how he was forced to close Lavabit

The owner of a secure email service, Lavabit, Ladar Lewison, finally revealed the details of the legal process, which resulted in the closure of the postal service last August.

Lavabit is an anonymous postal service that Edward Snowden used while in Sheremetyevo last summer. The service supported mail encryption in the browser before sending, so that the archive was stored in a securely encrypted form. Levison received a court order to issue TLS keys, refused to execute the order, destroyed the keys and erased the files. Before closing, about 410,000 mail accounts were registered with Lavabit.

The process took place behind closed doors, and only thanks to the appeal, with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union , the case documents were published .

It all started with the visit of two FBI agents last summer. They came with a court order to install the tracking equipment on the Lavabit server. Ladar Lewison says that he had no choice but to agree. Moreover, the FBI only got access to the encrypted database on the server, this did not directly threaten the security of users.
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Then the fun began. The FBI suddenly realized that it did not have access to the text of the mail letters - and demanded that the TLS secret keys be issued in order to decrypt the contents of the correspondence.

The refusal of the owner of Lavabit, under the pretext that nothing was said about the keys in the court order, surprised the agents a lot. Further communication with the Ministry of Justice lasted 38 days.

The Ministry of Justice claims that Levison “didn’t respond to the ruling for 11 days and refused to meet”, while “the state lost the opportunity to collect target data for that day every day”. The owner of Lavabit himself explains that these days he received 7 court orders and daily communicated with the FBI agents. He just worked hard to find a lawyer. It should be understood that the case was conducted in secrecy. He did not even have the opportunity to announce that he was seeking a lawyer, not to mention publicizing the conditions of the case. I had to speak with each lawyer personally, explain all the nuances of the case, and finding good, technically savvy lawyers who are ready to take on such a delicate matter is not easy to find.

However, watching on Snowden’s press conference on television, government agencies were furious — and summoned Lewison on the agenda. The humor is that the agenda was delivered less than a day before the court hearing, and it was necessary to fly over 1600 km to Virginia. Unfortunately, the lawyer found a few days before did not have time to join. Representatives of the Justice Ministry said that Levison will either come alone, or an arrest warrant will be issued. As a third party in a federal case, nothing threatened the freedom of the owner of the postal service, only his property. But failure to appear in court is another matter.

The trial itself was also organized tightly. The defendant was immediately warned that he had no right to appeal. The order for issuing encryption keys was replaced by a search warrant. Levison found a small law firm that helped him a lot, even though the court forbade the use of outside experts.

At that moment, Levison had to make a difficult decision. He was already punished for disobedience to the court, and it was impossible to delay further with obedience to the search warrant. Since during the search, law enforcement agencies could completely compromise the security system of the mail server, Levison decided to close the business he was in for 10 years and destroy the encryption keys.

Of course, you can blame the owner of Lavabit for the fact that he did not implement such an encryption system, in which he would not have the technical ability to compromise the user's correspondence. On the other hand, it is worth a lot to stand up to law enforcement agencies, protecting the right of people to the inviolability of private correspondence.

“If my experience can serve some purpose, then as an example of what is known to the majority: courts should not be allowed to consider issues of great importance under a veil of secrecy, otherwise we are involved in an expedited procedure of consideration without due process of law,” writes Ladar Levison. “If we allow our government to continue to work in secret, it’s only a matter of time when you or a person close to you are in a position like me,” standing in a secret courtroom, alone, without any serious protection that has always been considered a necessary condition for the protection ordinary people from the arbitrariness of state authorities. "