14 DAY TRIAL // The US government is convinced that Edward Snowden hasn’t been working alone to gather the NSA files that he shared with a few journalists.
According to a new set of documents involving email service Lavabit, which shut down last year after the feds demanded that the company shared its private encryption keys, the government is looking at two email accounts that have reportedly been used by Snowden.
The two addresses, [email protected] and [email protected], have been connected to the whistleblower and they’re the reason why the feds have tried to gain access to Lavabit’s encryption keys, even though sharing the SSL keys would have exposed several hundred thousand accounts, not just Snowden’s.
The file reveals that the government was interested in locating evidence of the identities of the users of the accounts and co-conspirators and others associated with them, including records about who created, used and communicated through those accounts.
The warrant Lavabit was served with last August states that the company must provide any and all information necessary to decrypt the content of the emails, “including, but not limited to public and private keys and algorithms.”
Lavabit’s Ladar Levison eventually complied with the order, after providing the feds with an indecipherable SSL key printed out on paper and being slammed by the judge with a $5,000 a day fine. After he did share the encryption keys, Levison decided to shut down the service.
While the [email protected] address is pretty self-explanatory, it looks like the whistleblower used the [email protected] one to arrange a “Crypto Party” in Hawaii in December 2012, right about the same time that he contacted Glenn Greenwald from the same account. He was trying, at the time, to teach people how to protect themselves from online snooping.
Edward Snowden then went on to try to convince Greenwald about the truth of his story and eventually shared what is believed to be about 200,000 documents from the National Security Agency, revealing the extent of the mass surveillance apparatus built by the agency and the complete disregard towards the privacy of innocent Internet users.
Even though it’s been almost a year since the first reports, a small number of files have so far made it into various publications and there are plenty more to come and expose programs that target regular Internet users, entire countries, politicians, nonprofit organizations or world organizations.