Snowden’s Email Service May be Accused of Contempt of Court Order

[Harry-Potter]

According to civil rights lawyers, the founder of Lavabit email service, Ladar Levison, is challenging a contempt of court order.
The matter is that when the case was brought against him, Levison initially refused to hand over the encryption keys to the authorities and preferred to shutdown the entire service. At the moment, the case is with the fourth US circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia.

 

 

The judges will deliver a decision in 45 days – the experts explain that if Levison’s appeal is rejected, he will be held in contempt of court and the legal issues surrounding the case won’t be resolved.
The Lavabit founder has argued that the authorities put an undue burden on the service by forcing it to hand over the SSL encryption keys as part of the investigation into well-known Snowden’s leak.
In result, Ladar Levison shut the mail service and has since argued that it is a violation of a Fourth Amendment right which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

The lawyers reveal that the hearing suggested the court was more interested in the procedural details of the case and the founder’s behavior rather than in Fourth Amendment issues about the legal position of encryption use.
The judges reiterated that the first order only asked for information, not for SSL keys. The problem is that the information could have been provided only by handing over those keys.

Lavabit was known worldwide as a secure email service where account holders used an encrypted key to access their mail, and they were the only one to have those keys.
The service founder explained that he could have provided the access to a single user’s account, but “live” access, demanded by the FBI, could have been provided only by compromising the entire system and its 410,000 users.

6 years ago, Hushmail found itself in similar situation and chose to acquiesce to a FBI demand.
The result was predictable – its reputation collapsed.
Now Lavabit is trying to argue that the government is making an unreasonable demand on the business and use it as a legal defense against a court order.
However, the judges in the case preferred to move away from encryption or any mention of the Fourth Amendment argument. They pointed out that the encryption key came in only after Lavabit was refusing to give FBI the unencrypted data.

[slick1109]

I respect the owner's decision to Shut Down as apposed to compromise the privacy of its users.  If only more companies were this dedicated to privacy, the net would be a safer place.  Even better, the fact that the government is making such a stink about it, that leads you to believe that they dont have the ability to hack the encryption algorithm on their own, otherwise they would not care if the SSL Keys were handed over or not.  It makes you wonder....

Edited February 18, 2014 by slick1109