Feds Hit Lavabit With A Warrant Back In April, But Shutdown Likely Over Something Much Bigger

from the not-your-everyday-search-warrant dept

Levison isn’t an privacy absolutist. He has cooperated in the past with government investigations. He says he’s received “two dozen” requests over the last ten years, and in cases where he had information, he would turn over what he had. Sometimes he had nothing; messages deleted from his service are deleted permanently.



“I’m not trying to protect people from law enforcement,” he said. “If information is unencrypted and law enforcement has a court order, I hand it over.”



In this case, it is the government’s method that bothers him. “The methods being used to conduct those investigations should not be secret,” he said.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Last week we wrote about a security-focused email service known as Lavabit shutting down in response to some sort of court order (the details of which Lavabit's founder, Ladar Levison, is barred from talking about). While most of the speculation has been about the claims that Ed Snowden has used a Lavabit email address, a reader points out to us that the government took an interest in Lavabit a few monthsthe whole Snowden affair started, issuing a search warrant concerning a Lavabit email account , Joey006@lavabit.com, back in March of this year, to be executed by April 11. From the affidavit supplied with the warrant, this involved an FBI investigation into child porn. It appears that Levison handed over a DVD in response to the warrant -- though the details of this were only filed with the court on June 10th (on a document signed on June 7th, two days after the first of the Snowden documents had been revealed, but before Snowden's name was revealed).Either way, given the timing of all of this, it'sthat the shutdown may have not involved Snowden or anything related to the NSA surveillance at all, but is the result of a totally unrelated case. Obviously, at this point, only the government and Levison actually know the details, but it does seem worth noting that the government has targeted Lavabit email addresses in the past. However, according to Levison himself, it seems clear that what they were asking for that made him shut down was quite a bit more involved than an ordinary search warrant. In an interview with Forbes, Levison stated that he's cooperated in the past with government requests, noting that there have been about two dozen over the past decade.That certainly suggests that what the government was asking for here wasn't a mere search warrant for existing information associated with an account, but something more involved -- such as a proactive wiretap on all future messages, something that you'd imagine the feds would be interested in on an account of someone such as Snowden.

Filed Under: email, ladar levison, search warrants

Companies: lavabit