Political repression may not be the government's overt intent, but it works
At this point, there's no indication that Levison and Lavabit ever had anything but a commercial relationship with Snowden. It's even possible that Snowden had nothing to do with the FBI's initial interest in Lavabit. It may be that Lavabit's effective security was sufficient offense to the surveillance forces to make it an object of attack for its own sake. In May 2013, Levison says he had the impression the FBI agents who talked to him didn't even know who or what was the subject of their investigation. The FBI hasn't said.
Levison is not an obviously political person, he hasn't been revealed to be involved in party politics or political causes. "Until last summer, Mr. Levison, a Republican of libertarian leanings, had not been active in politics," according to the New York Times October 9. He seems to be the person he seems to be: a thoughtful, hardworking, physically fit, computer business guy who has had a dog named Princess since January 2010 and who spends a lot of his spare time keeping in shape playing beach volleyball.
Princess has her own album on his Facebook page, where the dominant theme by far is Levison's competition in beach volleyball (with albums for Sunday Night, as well as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Nights) and there is one picture of Levison with Rep. Ron Paul. Levison's page shows membership in just one Facebook group, "OCCUPY (Support) EDWARD SNOWDEN and All Other Whistleblowers," to which someone else added him about two months ago. Among his 43 "Likes," Levison lists two Interests (programming and computers), lots of volleyball Activities, and six books, including William Gibson's "Neuromancer," George Orwell's "1984," and Dostoevski's "Crime and Punishment."
From another perspective, Levison is as political as the Fourth Amendment, which is as profoundly political as it gets. It was the Patriot Act's assault on the Fourth Amendment, Levison says, that contributed to his decision to start Lavabit in 2004, when the act was up for renewal and much in the news. Among the many objections to the act was that it gave to federal agents excessive authority to, in effect, write their own search warrants on no other authority but their own. In the Orwellian language of the act, these personal searched warrants are known as "national security letters." Levison designed the security architecture of the Lavabit email and storage services to be beyond the reach of unwarranted searches, even in national security letters. As Levison recalled on Democracy NOW! in August:
"And as I was designing and developing the custom platform, it was right around when the PATRIOT Act came out. And that's really what colored my opinion and my philosophy, and why I chose to take the extra effort and build in the secure storage features and sort of focus on the privacy niche and the security focus niche". [for]
people who want email but don't necessarily want it lumped in and profiled along with their searches or their browsing history or any of their other Internet activities."
You can't reveal what you don't know -- and that provides more security
During May 2013, Levison met for "a couple hours" with FBI agents at his office, where he explained how his security system and his business operated. As Levison told Democracy NOW! the service included his personal pledge of security:
"I've always liked to say my service was by geeks, for geeks. It's grown up over the last 10 years, it's sort of settled itself into serving those that are very privacy-conscious and security-focused. We offered secure access via high-grade encryption. And at least for our paid users, not for our free accounts--I think that's an important distinction--we offered secure storage, where incoming emails were stored in such a way that they could only be accessed with the user's password, so that, you know, even myself couldn't retrieve those emails.
"And that's what we meant by encrypted email. That's a term that's sort of been thrown around because there are so many different standards for encryption, but in our case it was encrypted in secure storage, because, as a third party, you know, I didn't want to be put in a situation where I had to turn over private information. I just didn't have it. I didn't have access to it."
Over the years, Lavabit has received and complied with "at least two dozen subpoenas" from the local sheriff's office to the federal courts, Levison says, "I've always complied with the law." Each of those subpoenas targeted a specific individual and appeared to Levison to be consistent with the Fourth Amendment. As recently as June 2013, he complied with an unrelated subpoena seeking information on one of his subscribers accused of violating child pornography law.
A secret subpoena from the American police state is different
On June 6, 2013, the Guardian began publishing surveillance state revelations based on documents from Edward Snowden, the Lavabit.com email subscriber. On June 9, Snowden revealed that he was the whistlblower who leaked documents to the Guardian and others. The first secret court order against Lavabit came the next day.
On or about June 10, the Justice Dept., on behalf of the FBI, went to federal court to compel Lavabit to provide information "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation" involving someone with a single Lavabit email account. The FBI has not identified the subject of this investigation, but it is widely believed to be Snowden.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
