14 DAY TRIAL // About a month ago, the owner of Lavabit, an encrypted email service Edward Snowden was using, announced the service would be closing for reasons he could not reveal due to a gag order.
Ladar Levinson hasn’t been sitting idly for this, however, and has filed an appeal against the secret surveillance order that led him to shut down the site.
He has managed to raise more than $100,000 (€75,000) to finance the appeal.
“It’s become clear to me over last couple of months that all of the major providers here in the US have provided our government with real-time access to private information of their users,” Levinson told RT.
“They don’t really have a choice about it and they don’t really have the ability to tell anybody about it. Fact is, if you trust your data to a company, even if they haven’t already been approached and been required to provide access, the simple fact is they could be in the future, unless that judicial precedent is set or Congress takes action,” the Lavabit owner said.
He even mentioned considering the option of moving his service overseas, but he wasn’t certain such an arrangement could guarantee freedom for his customers from the United States. Since he is an American, if he were to continue running the service, he could still be required to compromise security.
In an announcement made by Ladar Levison in August, he mentions he’s been forced to make the difficult decision to shut the door on 10 years of hard work, as an alternative to “become complicit in crimes against the American people.”
And while Levinson might not have divulged the real problem, many immediately suspected the NSA had asked for the encryption key and access to Snowden’s account. Considering the latest revelations regarding NSA’s efforts to crack and bypass any type of encryption, the theory isn’t farfetched at all.