Given the most recent revelations, it's easy to figure out what happened to Lavabit

Sep 6, 2013 16:33 GMT  ·  By

A few weeks ago, encrypted email provider Lavabit shocked its users by announcing that the service and the company would shut down, starting the moment of the announcement.

This left many users without access to some of their messages and without their email addresses. Plenty were upset, but most probably understood that it was the only choice for Lavabit.

The company's owner Ladar Levison explained that, while he couldn't go into details, he was unable to provide the service his customers have gotten accustomed with, hinting that the government had sent him a secret order of some kind.

The company, since it offered an encrypted email service, was used to getting requests for user data from the government. In fact, the policy was to comply with the secret orders and provide whatever it could.

But this time around, the government wanted more, a lot more. The speculation was that the NSA came knocking wanting to install a permanent spying tool, i.e. to have Lavabit compromise the security of all of its users so that the NSA could tap into any communications going through the service, as it pleased.

Lavabit couldn't confirm this, fearing the secret gag order which it couldn't confirm either, so no one could say for certain what happened.

That hasn't changed now, few people except Levison and the US government know what's really going on, but in the light of the most recent revelations from the Edward Snowden files, there can be no more doubt as to what the government was asking.

New leaked documents seen by Guardian and New York Times journalists reveal that the NSA has made great inroads into breaking or bypassing most encryption on the internet. One of the ways it does this is by forcing or convincing companies to leave backdoors open for the NSA to access.

This is a widespread practice and it can be assumed that any company gets a request like this eventually, if it gets big enough. It's almost certain at this point that this is what the NSA asked Lavabit though you can be sure that the US government will spend years and plenty of money trying to hide that.