14 DAY TRIAL // Ladar Levison went from running an email company to avoiding email like the plague. The owner of Lavabit, an encrypted email company, shut down the service more than a month ago for reasons he can't talk about, but which likely have to do with the US government asking him to compromise the security of the service and allow wide, unsupervised wiretapping access.
Levinson killed his company rather than become a puppet for the government. Since then, he's had to be careful what he said and to whom. He's under a gag order over the request from the government, so he can't talk about the request. He can’t even say that it exists or that the government is not allowing him to talk about it.
On stage at the Privacy Identity Innovation conference in Seattle, Levinson revealed that he hasn't used email, any email, at all since August 8 when he announced the company would be shutting down.
When he needs to talk to someone, as AllThingsD notes, he uses Facebook, phone calls, or Silent Circle's encrypted messaging service. For sensitive stuff, he picks a safe location where a parabolic mic can't be used, shuts down his phone, and meets people in person.
Still, he's a bit more willing to talk now than in the early stages when he was worried he may be arrested for revealing too much about the order he wasn't supposed to talk about.
But, he says, he's less worried about that now. In fact, he's more worried about what the government might do about his future plans. In his own words, he has gone from being a small business owner to being a political activist, one that plans to do something about the culture of secrecy in the US.
"There are only so many people in this country that have any idea what’s really going on, and they may only know a small part of the picture, and they can't talk about it, they can’t tell us, because if they do they'll go to jail,” Levison said. "It's a dangerous world we live in when the administration can effectively violate the Constitution and then make it a crime for anybody who knows about it to tell the world that there was a violation of the Constitution."