14 DAY TRIAL // It’s official, the government wanted Snowden’s records and the Lavabit SSL Key to decrypt his messages.
Of course, this was the first thing everyone talked about when they heard Snowden’s go-to mail service was shutting down because they refused to comply with a governmental order.
According to unsealed documents, Lavabit refused to turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, despite a court order and fines. Ultimately, Lavabit’s owner decided to shut down the service, but he continued to fight for what he thought was right.
And while the name of the target was redacted from the unsealed records, coincidence is too big to assume it’s anyone other than Snowden, given the timing of the court order.
The filings show Lavabit was served with a “pen register” order on June 28, requiring it to record and provide the government with the email “to” and “from” lines on every email, as well as the IP address used to access the inbox. These do not require any type of probable cause since they provide only metadata.
Ladar Levison didn’t comply with the order and the government later filed a motion to compel the company to comply.
“The representative of Lavabit indicated that Lavabit had the technical capability to decrypt the information, but that Lavabit did not want to ‘defeat its own system’,” the document reveals.
Halfway through July, prosecutors came up with a search warrant demanding all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from the Lavabit email account, including encryption keys and SSL keys.
With the SSL key, all encrypted communications could have been decrypted quite easily. It wasn’t long after that Lavabit’s owner decided to close down the service, as Levison was being fined $5,000 (€3,676) per day starting August 6.