Typically, I don’t write blog posts on political or hacktivist topics. However, I recently came across an article that actually managed to make me laugh out loud.
Newly released court documents show Ladar Levison, founder of secure email service Lavabit, once used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, has been fined $10,000 for failing to give federal agents access to his customers’ accounts.
Court documents reveal the FBI wanted Lavinson to hand over the private SSL certificates used to encrypt all traffic on Lavabit, giving the FBI access to not only Snowden’s email, but also the email of Lavabit’s 40,000 customers.
While the FBI and federal prosecutors claim they only wanted to monitor Snowden, Levison felt the federal warrant was reaching a little too far. “You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,” he told The New York Times. “In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection.”
In a brilliant attempt to protect the privacy of his customers, Levison complied with the letter of the order, intentionally printing the encryption keys as strings of numbers on paper in a font specifically designed to be hard to scan. Prosecutors described the printouts as “largely illegible.”
Apparently Federal Judge Claude Hilton did not find this as funny as I did, and found Levison in contempt of court, imposing a $5,000 per day fine until the certificates were produced in electronic format.
Realizing the futility of a small business combating the Federal Government, Levison relented and handed over the certificates at the same time he shut down the Lavabit service. One prosecutor described Levison’s actions as “just short of a criminal act.”
“How as a small business do you hire the lawyers to appeal this and change public opinion to get the laws changed,” Levison told the NYT, “when Congress doesn’t even know what is going on?” Thankfully, we have at least one working brain in Congress. Rand Paul, the Republican junior senator for Kentucky has spoken up in support of Levison, urging voters to sign a petition against the NSA, and help fund Levison’s legal defense through donations to Campaign for Liberty.
“Even though he’s lost his main source of income, Ladar Levison is fighting back,” Paul wrote in a statement. “I believe his legal battle is a key part in our shared fight to restore our Fourth Amendment freedoms.”
Bravo, Mr. Levison. I tip my hat to you.
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