Lavabit and the Strong Arm of Big Brother USA

Oui

11 years ago

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Cross-posted at the blue site – European Tribune – across the big pond.

Do we need to say more than publishing the letter of a Texas entrepreneur … his has been hit by a gag order and a choice to become complicit in crimes against the American people. He has chosen to fold his company encrypting email of US citizens.

From Lavabit website

My Fellow Users,

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. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. 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. 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.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

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.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund

ZD Net: Snowden’s privacy-oriented email provider shuts down under U.S. government pressure

Before and after Edward Snowden engineered the NSA document heist, he had been in touch via e-mail with several journalists scattered around the world. As part of the communication process, Snowden insisted on encrypting his correspondence using PGP software. He also used Lavabit, which offered “Security Through Asymmetric Encryption” as a key part of its service. In a white paper explaining its technology, Lavabit said “Lavabit has developed a system so secure that it prevents everyone, including us, from reading the e-mail of the people that use it.”

(The whitepaper is no longer available online, but a copy is still available in the Internet Archive.)

IRS manual detailed DEA’s use of hidden intel evidence

(Reuters) – Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defence lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency.

As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

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