At first I was more on the Lavabit side on this. But it is looking more like they started the whole thing when they defied the initial court order to provide connection info for that one specific user that was the target of an FBI investigation. When served with a warrant, you can't just tell them to fuck off and expect the matter to be over. They will simply go harder... and not go home. I'm concerned that our outrage over "mass surveillance being used for fishing expeditions" has clouded our judgment when it comes to "law enforcement legitimately gathering evidence for an active case against one specific person." Once they have a person of interest, their job is to continue to find evidence to bolster their case. That evidence will take different forms and come from different sources. I have no problems with companies complying with search warrants and court orders by providing evidence regarding illegal activity of a particular suspect. This is different than providing back doors for law enforcement to go looking for suspects.
A commenter on that story makes a good point: Forget for a moment that the user they were looking for was Snowden. If the FBI had been looking for info for a case against a serial killer or a child porn ring, would we still hold Lavabit as heroes for not following the court order?
> A commenter on that story makes a good point: Forget for a moment that the user they were looking for was Snowden. If the FBI had been looking for info for a case against a serial killer or a child porn ring, would we still hold Lavabit as heroes for not following the court order?
I would, because it's impossible to forget for a moment about Snowden. The context cannot be ignored; this is about Snowden. It's better to let 1,000 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man behind bars. As far as I'm concerned Snowden did the right thing and if protecting other criminals is the only way to ensure Snowden's protection... so be it. To quote Armin from Attack on Titans: "If you aren't willing to sacrifice anything, you can't change anything". In this case, sacrificing the chance to punish the guilty is worthy of protecting the innocent.
"If you aren't willing to sacrifice anything, you can't change anything"
Oddly enough, this is why I have issues with the way in which people now protest against unjust laws.
The effectiveness of civil disobedience comes from putting authorities in a position where they must enforce an unjust law to the letter, thus demonstrating to the general public the injustice of the law itself and rallying support to change the law.
This means that civil disobedience effectively requires the person engaging in it to suffer the consequences of disobedience. If a law is unjust, but violators who attempt to demonstrate this can simply walk away relatively unscathed, then it's a lot more difficult to make the case to the public at large that the law is unjust. After all, that guy jumped up and down on the law, and got away with it! How bad could it really be?
But it seems that what we have now is a generation of people who are willing to take the step of declaring the law unjust, and willing to take the step of breaking it to make a point, but unwilling to suffer the consequences which would demonstrate the injustice to the public. Which accomplishes little.
I think Lavabit's owner and Snowden are suffering consequences for the choices they've made; more than they should be. I'm happy to ease that pain in whatever little way I can.
They shouldn't be allowed to go harder. It should have ended with contempt of court. Coming at him asking him for the SSL keys protecting 400,000 people should be illegal. Under what grounds can they arbitrarily increase the scope several order of magnitude with the intent to intimidate? It should have ended with fines, which eventually lead him to shut down the business because it was no longer possible. Fines are a cost of doing business that previously had not factored in. Trying to force his hand by compromising the entire service when none of the other 399,000 other people had anything to do with the crime of 1 is wrong and shouldn't even be an option on the table.
Furthermore, contempt of court should come with the ability to renounce your citizenship and be deported as a political refugee. In fact, that should be the punishment if fines don't work, not jail. Contempt of court is simply a statement that "Previously I lived in this country and supported its laws, but I've committed no crime and am now asked to support some aspect of this nation's laws that I don't agree with. I am now choosing to reject those laws as my own, even if that means that I will be deprived of the right to live in this nation." I really don't understand how jail time eventually become the punishment for rejecting laws but having committed no crime.
That being said, anyone who is in jeopardy of having to give up their citizenship should have due process in a court of law before being forced to do so.
But they knew they were protecting someone under investigation for violations of the Espionage Act and theft of government property. It seems kind of shitty to not help find that person.
Yeah, because in the time frame this was going down, it would have been a totally unreasonable assumption that someone matching those particular crimes described Edward Snowden.
Of course they knew who they were looking for - it was necessary for that to be disclosed in order for the government to even demand the information in the first place. That's what a warrant is.
For as much was wrong with the government's request, it's first request was at least reasonable: specific knowledge on Edward Snowden. The inherent architecture of Lavabit rendered this request unreasonable, and things escalated from there.
Sure enough, the court documents and transcripts clearly have "target" followed by blacked out spaces just wide enough for Snowden, spoken by both lawyers and Mr. Levison. This happens dozens of times throughout the recently unsealed documents.
I didn't say they did or did not know who it was. I don't know if they knew or not. I responded to someone who claimed they didn't know as if that was an excuse. Whether they knew or not isn't even relevant for me. At a minimum, they at least knew what the person was under investigation for... which should have been enough.
That's like saying the bankers in the Cayman Islands don't know who they're a tax haven for. The only difference here is that Lavabit is under US jurisdiction.
It appears that in this case the difference was that rather than ask Lavabit to turn over information they already had, Lavabit would have had to actively modify their system to record the information that the FBI wanted.
That's why the FBI changed tack and asked them to turn over the SSL private keys - because that was information that Lavabit already had, and the FBI could use those keys to record the information they wanted for themselves.
Lavabit defied the initial court order that would give FBI access to all user's data and content as they demanded to install their own equipment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6487778
It's interesting to apply that same logic to Lavabit itself. Perhaps, knowing the Snowden was the target of the subpoena, the Lavabit founder thought of himself as a member of a modern day underground railroad, intentionally disobeying the FBI to give Snowden time to find safe passage.
When Lavabit first shut down, they claimed that they have no problem complying with individual court orders, but refused to be complicit in crimes against humanity. Perhaps they protected Snowden to enable him to publicize those crimes, and that if the target was a serial killer, Lavabit would have complied.
A commenter on that story makes a good point: Forget for a moment that the user they were looking for was Snowden. If the FBI had been looking for info for a case against a serial killer or a child porn ring, would we still hold Lavabit as heroes for not following the court order?