What Exactly Did The US Government Ask Lavabit to Do? (opens in new tab)

This gets asked a lot currently. The sentiment seems to be that email is doomed from a security viewpoint. You'll be leaking metadata no matter what. Even if your email provider was somehow secure, you have no way of knowing if the person (and their provider) you are communicating with is secure. If it's not (which is very likely) then all your efforts to secure your end are almost for nothing.

So yeah, my suggestion currently is to acknowledge the level of secrecy (or rather lack of) available with your email setup and use it accordingly.

There are no providers who can provide full protection from a court order. The only solution is to encrypt on the client side using PGP or S/MIME and make everyone you communicate with do the same. But that means you can only login to your email from computers where your private certificate is installed. It also means no more webmail and no more search capabilities.

Yes: run your own mail server.

This raises the barrier enough so that the NSA/FBI can't just request access to your mail. Instead now they would have to either physically access the mail server, or use extremely offensive techniques (backdoor your computer, take control of your mail server via a software vulnerability, etc).

Lavabit's closure highlights the fact that third-party email providers cannot be trusted to keep your email private.

Even running your own mailserver (on a computer in your home, for example) won't save you from dragnet NSA surveillance or targeted attacks, but at least you'll know if the government sends you a National Security Letter or obtains a FISA court order for your email.

It depends on what you are trying to prevent.

If you run your own MTA/IMAP server and lock down the OS and BIOS sufficiently -- including encrypting the hard drive -- you can be fairly confident that your at rest emails, including metadata, will not be accessed without your knowledge. But there's not much at all you can do to prevent mail sent to or from your machine from being intercepted. Configuring your MTA to only converse over TLS will help, but ultimately you have no good reason to trust the other mail server.

You can encrypt all your message bodies using either PGP or S/MAIL, but that requires the people you are conversing with the have key pairs, and doesn't protect metadata.

Could you trust any that remain operating, after the Lavabit fiasco?

Levison did make a comment once that he couldn't give the government what he didn't have, referring to deleted emails. I didn't address that in the article but it is another dimension to this. Being that this is all about something he didn't already have, chances are that archived messages was one of those things.

Nevertheless, the means to decrypt those messages still is the critical difference here.

Had it been because of the Stored Communications Act, would that explain why he couldn't talk about it?

> Only a handful of mail providers (like Google) have the option to encrypt traffic server to server.

SSL/TLS is available for everyone.

> Most mail servers transmit messages in the clear to each other and only encrypt the server to client side.

I hear this again and again, but I can't really find any data that confirms this claim one way or another. Anyone on HN running their own mailserver wanting to comment on how large portion of connections get encrypted?

Perhaps only a handful such as Google will use SSL but Google is a HUGE percentage of email.

That's actually the whole point, in the past he complied with warrants because there wasn't much he could supply in the first place. Yes there is a lot of reading between the lines here, but there was a clear line they crossed. In other words, he would no longer be able to just turn over a bunch of encrypted emails, this was a full compromise of the security he had in place.

If you look at the quotes he made, he strongly hints that this affects all his users, that they want to collect data for later review, and that they would have the ability to decrypt any emails they wanted. Yes, there is a lot of speculation going on here, but it is based on facts--what they technically would be able to do based on how Lavabit worked.

Edit: this wasn't just some casual speculation, I did quite a bit of research on this and carefully reviewed every statement he has given to the press. I carefully analyzed their infrastructure and encryption techniques. I'm fairly confident with my conclusions.

>This may seem like a stretch, but when you consider the government is using secret interpretations of laws how is it any different than what they are doing?

The difference is that they have the guns, the tanks, and the full weight of the Department of Justice behind them.

Until we get someone to risk going open with this we won't ever know. You can't fight a secret law in secret very well. But only people served with a secret demand has standing to challenge it. The barriers are too high as long as the Government can keep the secret. Once it's out of the bag you have more options in court. But you also risk everything they can do to you in secret.

Secrets have no place in a "democracy".

Accepting the money would be a death sentence, essentially. Nobody would do it.

Right and the important point being that this isn't just about sniffing his network, it is the most invasive surveillance possible that would make his whole business a lie. The point of the article was to go through the logic to show that this would have been the only possibility for what they requested him to do.