14 DAY TRIAL // The US government sees absolutely nothing wrong in how it goes about its investigations in an effort to get its hands on the information it seeks, or at least that’s what Lavabit’s Ladar Levison believes.
In an interview for RT, Levison said that, as far as the government was concerned, they should be able to force someone in his position to do anything humanly possible to aid in their investigation.
“They definitely feel like what they’re doing is right and they just look at is as, you know, they’re going after a criminal. They don’t see the implications of what they’re doing,” he tells the publication.
Levison also admits that he wasn’t trying to protect Snowden per se when he was fighting the government requests, but rather the entire user base.
“What they demanded were the SSL keys that were protecting all the data coming in and out of my network for all of my users, and that’s what I had an issue with. I’ve said before that I took the stance that I did not to try and protect a single person but because I was concerned about the invasion and the sacrificing of everyone’s privacy rights that were accessing my system,” the Lavabit chief said.
Back in August, Lavabit’s owner announced the service was closing off because he found it to be the only way to avoid the government requests. He later made a formal request to declassify the legal details of his two-month battle with the government agencies.
These files were declassified earlier this week and they reveal exactly what many were assuming since the close-down announcement, namely that Levison was asked to hand over the SSL keys that would help the government decrypt Snowden’s mail records without the need of the whistleblower’s personal key.