Lavabit was fighting the good fight, although the courts dont see it that way. This is yet another example of why the system is broken, corrupted and just asking for rebellion and revolution. The US government dismissed Lavabit’s parade of ‘hypotheticals’ in a DOJ legal brief filed in federal court. The government stands by its right to obtain unfettered access to encrypted email services in the potentially landmark surveillance case. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) 60-page appellate brief defended the government’s use of a search warrant and grand jury subpoena to obtain Lavabit’s Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): cryptographic protocols which provide for secure communications over the Internet. The government implicitly admonished the email provider’s founder, Ladar Levison, for trammeling the FBI’s surveillance activities by effectively scuttling access to the target, widely believed to be NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden. “Mr. Levison alerted all of Lavabit’s users, including the target of the investigation, that Lavabit was engaged in litigation with the government and that, rather than comply with the court’s orders, he decided to shut down his business,” the DOJ said in the brief. The government also repudiated what is called a parade of hypotheticals regarding potential government abuse that was used to justify complying with the lawful order. Were a government officer to do as Lavabit fears and rummage through other users communications without authorization, that would be a crime,” the DOJ wrote. The Justice Department remained firm in its position that an Internet service provider can be compelled to turn over SSL keys granting access to its entire system, even if law enforcement intends to surveil one single user. “Just as a business cannot prevent the execution of a search warrant by locking its front gate, an electronic communications service provider cannot thwart court-ordered electronic surveillance by refusing to provide necessary information about its systems,” the brief read. Crucially, the government argues: “That other information not subject to the warrant was encrypted using the same set of keys is irrelevant; the only user data the court permitted the government to obtain was the data described in the pen/trap order and the search warrant. All other data would be filtered electronically, without reaching any human eye.” The government brief further states that Lavabit’s business model does not supplant the law, and therefore marketing one’s business as ‘secure’ “does not give one license to ignore a District Court of the United States.”
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 02:21:56 +0000
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