Ladar Levison files an appeal against the court order that pushed him to close Lavabit

Oct 11, 2013 06:44 GMT  ·  By

Lavabit’s founder has officially filed an appeal for the court order that enabled the government to demand the SSL keys of the service and this looks like it’s going to be a landmark privacy case.

According to the brief filed in the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, the government response is due by November 4.

Ladar Levison, the Lavabit founder, takes the time to defend his refusal to hand over private keys since they “were not contraband, were not the fruits of any crime, were not used to commit any crime, and were not evidence of any crime.”

The document has over 40 pages in which Levison argues that the pen register statute doesn’t authorize the US government to seize the keys to its encryption. Furthermore, such an action is against the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.

“The Fourth Amendment insists that a warrant name particular things to be searched; a warrant that permits open-ended rummaging through all of Lavabit’s communications data is simply a modern-day writ of assistance, the sort of general warrant that the Fourth Amendment was ratified to forbid,” the document reads.

The file also reveals that the officials forbade Lavabit from informing customers and partners that it had compromised its security.

“The government insisted that all of those parties be affirmatively misled into believing that the system remained secure against exactly the kind of secret monitoring that the government was proposing to do,” Levison’s file reads.

Lavabit closed in early August after over two months of fighting with the FBI on what information they had to provide. When Levison was ordered to hand over the SSL keys of the email service, he provided the FBI with a printout of the key in an illegible font, effectively making sure they wouldn’t actually be able to read anything.

In turn, the court ordered Levison to provide a digital copy of the keys, but he chose to close down the service rather than provide that data or pay $5,000 (€3,693) in daily fines.