Lavabit vs the United States

Good day all, this is the Angry Systems administrator. Normally I don’t get involved with politics to much, but this story is rather technical in nature. As you are aware, Edward Snowden stole the keys to the NSA kingdom and has been happily embarrassing the United States Government.

His releases have been showing just how badly various government agencies have been acting towards the American People and just how badly they have abused the Constitution of the United States. I’m not going to be talking about that except as needed for background. Instead, I’m going to write about a small encrypted mail service called Lavabit that Snowden used.

Lavabit was a small company that provided secure email accounts for it’s subscribers. It was basically a a 1-2 man business. The problems began when Snowden blew the whistle on the governments spying illegally on the American people. The FBI quickly determined that Snowden used Lavabit as his email service and wanted access to the messages. I’ll let the New York Times continue:

One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find an F.B.I. agent’s business card on his Dallas doorstep. So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end with Mr. Levison’s shutting the business he had spent a decade building and becoming an unlikely hero of privacy advocates in their escalating battle with the government over Internet security.

Prosecutors, it turned out, were pursuing a notable user of Lavabit, Mr. Levison’s secure e-mail service: Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents that have put the intelligence agency under sharp scrutiny. Mr. Levison was willing to allow investigators with a court order to tap Mr. Snowden’s e-mail account; he had complied with similar narrowly targeted requests involving other customers about two dozen times.

Now there is nothing unusual about the FBI asking for access to a person’s email, provided the proper legal documents and warrants are applied for and issued. It’s what the FBI wanted next that exploded all over the internet.

But they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much.

Can we say violation of the 4^th Amendment? Sure we can! And Mr. Levinson refused.

“You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,” Mr. Levison, 32, said in a recent interview. “In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection.”

The FBI has a long history of abusing it’s authority and they aren’t to happy when the peons won’t submit to their demands.

On Aug. 8, Mr. Levison closed Lavabit rather than, in his view, betray his promise of secure e-mail to his customers. The move, which he explained in a letter on his Web site, drew fervent support from civil libertarians but was seen by prosecutors as an act of defiance that fell just short of a crime.

These prosecutors are the real criminals these days. We have been seeing ever increasing levels of prosecutorial misconduct for years. In some cases it’s so egregious even the courts finally have to come down on them. One of the problems was the gag orders issued by the courts and FBI preventing Mr. Levison from going into the details of what was happening. That gag order ended a few weeks ago and the true nature of the demands by the government have come out.

The full story of what happened to Mr. Levison since May has not previously been told, in part because he was subject to a court’s gag order. But on Wednesday, a federal judge unsealed documents in the case, allowing the tech entrepreneur to speak candidly for the first time about his experiences. He had been summoned to testify to a grand jury in Virginia; forbidden to discuss his case; held in contempt of court and fined $10,000 for handing over his private encryption keys on paper and not in digital form; and, finally, threatened with arrest for saying too much when he shuttered his business.

This is not the action of a constitutional republic, this is the actions of a totalitarian state. Secret courts, gag orders, denial of rights. And they wonder why people are buying guns and ammo in such quantities.

Mr. Levison said he set up Lavabit to make it impossible for outsiders, whether governments or hackers, to spy on users’ communications. He followed the government’s own secure coding guidelines, based on the N.S.A.’s technical guidance, and engineered his systems so as not to log user communications. That way, even if he received a subpoena for a user’s communications, he would not be able to gain access to them. For added measure, he gave customers the option to pay extra to encrypt their e-mail and passwords.

One of the issues, thanks to Snowden, is no one trusts the guidelines and promises any longer. Some are just general best practices, but the NSA has also released code and applications for people to use. I won’t touch their code now with a 10 foot pole and I’m not alone.

On occasion, he was asked to comply with government requests for specific e-mail accounts, including that of a child pornography suspect in Maryland this year. Mr. Levison said he had no qualms about cooperating with such demands, but the latest request was far broader, apparently to allow investigators to track Mr. Snowden’s whereabouts and associates.

No one has a problem going after criminals and as the requests are targeted towards those individuals who are being investigated, and this would include Snowden, no one would mind to much. However, this is not what the FBI wanted.

Court documents show, Mr. Levison had already received a subpoena for Mr. Snowden’s encrypted e-mail account. The government was particularly interested in his e-mail metadata — with whom Mr. Snowden was communicating, when and from where. The order, from the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., required Mr. Levison to log Mr. Snowden’s account information and provide the F.B.I. with “technical assistance,” which agents told him meant handing over the private encryption keys, technically called SSL certificates, that unlock communications for all users, he said.

“It was the equivalent of asking Coca-Cola to hand over its secret formula,” Mr. Levison said.

So the FBI wanted to raid the contents of mailboxes of every single Lavabit subscriber. And of course, not a single one of those subscribers were to be informed that their personal and private communications had been given to the FBI. Who knows what other information, not pertaining to Snowden, they might have found? Needless to say, Mr. Levinson was not happy.

“The whole concept of the Internet was built on the idea that companies can keep their own keys,” Mr. Levison said. He told the agents that he would need their request for his encryption keys in writing.

A redacted version of that request, which was among the 23 documents that were unsealed, shows that the court issued an order July 16 for Lavabit’s encryption keys. Prosecutors said they had no intention of collecting any information on Lavabit’s 400,000 other customers. “There’s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever,” Jim Trump, one of the prosecutors, said at a closed Aug. 1 hearing.

And if you believe that, I have nice bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you. Even so, Mr. Levinson tried to comply with the order while protecting his clients.

But Mr. Levison said he spent much of the following day thinking of a compromise. He would log the target’s communications, unscramble them with the encryption keys and upload them to a government server once a day. The F.B.I. told him that was not enough. It needed his target’s communications “in real time,” he said.

“How as a small business do you hire the lawyers to appeal this and change public opinion to get the laws changed when Congress doesn’t even know what is going on?” Mr. Levison said.

And there is another thing we can thank Snowden for. We have since learned that the NSA and other agencies outright lied to congress, and furthermore, the oversight committees meant to keep an eye on these agencies, lied to the general membership of Congress.

When it was clear Mr. Levison had no choice but to comply, he devised a way to obey the order but make the government’s intrusion more arduous. On Aug 2, he infuriated agents by printing the encryption keys — long strings of seemingly random numbers — on paper in a font he believed would be hard to scan and turn into a usable digital format. Indeed, prosecutors described the file as “largely illegible.”

Awww, isn’t that a shame? Still, they could have done it, but it would have required them to do some actual work. I’ve had to transcribe license keys from print into digital format in the past. It’s a royal pain to do, but it can be done. Of course, the Government would rather force others to do their work for them.

On Aug. 5, Judge Claude M. Hilton ordered a $5,000-a-day fine until Mr. Levison produced the keys in electronic form. Mr. Levison’s lawyer, Jesse R. Binnall, appealed both the order to turn over the keys and the fine.

Not that it would have done much good. The checks and balances that would have prevented this mess in the first place have long since been destroyed.

After two days, Mr. Levison gave in, turning over the digital keys — and simultaneously closing his e-mail service, apologizing to customers on his site. That double maneuver, a prosecutor later told his lawyer, fell just short of a criminal act.

The real criminals are the prosecutors and judges handling this case. Even though the abuses of the NSA and other agencies aren’t being covered much by the Main Stream Media, there are still members of congress trying to get to the bottom of all this. Snowden is still releasing data that shows just how corrupt the federal government has become. There are also other web sites that are following this and other stories such as The infamous Slash Dot and Tech Dirt. Eventually, there will come the final straw in the Government’s overreach and the entire house of cards will collapse. We may be seeing the beginning stages of that collapse today.

Thank You

~The Angry Systems Administrator~

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