US authorities mistakenly made public the document where Snowden is listed as an object of surveillance in the case against Lavabit

In May 2014, the owner of a secure email service, Lavabit, Ladar Lewison, reported on the details of the legal process, as a result of which the postal service had to be closed. The FBI and the Department of Justice have not yet recognized that they needed access to the Lavabit servers for the sole purpose of reading Edward Snowden's mail. But now, because of the inattention of officials, the truth has leaked out.

Lavabit is an anonymous postal service that Edward Snowden used while in Sheremetyevo in the summer of 2013. At this time, the FBI agents came to the hosting provider and demanded to install tracking equipment on the Lavabit server. They then discovered that the mail on the server was encrypted - and they demanded that Levison give out TLS secret keys in order to decrypt the contents of the correspondence. He refused. Further proceedings with the Ministry of Justice lasted 38 days.

The process was not simple and was conducted behind closed doors, that is, Levison did not even have to openly announce that he was looking for a lawyer. Until recently he refused to give out encryption keys. Watching Snowden’s press conferences on television, government agencies were furious — and summoned Lewison on the agenda. As a result of the court hearing, the order for issuing encryption keys was replaced with a search warrant without the right to file an appeal.
')
Since during the search, law enforcement agencies could completely compromise the security system of the mail server, Levison decided to close the business in which he had been in business for 10 years and destroy the encryption keys.

Almost two years passed, and Ladar Levison spent them in silence. For the disclosure of information about the object of the FBI investigation, he was threatened with a prison. At the same time, he continued to litigate with the Ministry of Justice, with the help of community donations, demanding the publication of documents on his case. The US authorities agreed to publish a number of documents, deleting (filling in) confidential information, but made a ridiculous mistake - and they themselves accidentally gave out a secret. The other day they published the documents, but forgot to fill in a line with information about the object of investigation, where the e-mail address is Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. Thus, they officially confirmed what everyone already guessed about: the purpose of spying the FBI was Edward Snowden.



The document was published on March 4 in the federal judicial system Pacer. This week, activists from the Cryptome website discovered it and placed it at home .

The editors of Wired asked for a comment from Levison’s lawyers, but they said that by a court decision of January 2016, they still had no right to give the name of the person who was being monitored. Although now it is already known to all.