I didn’t know about Lavabit until they pulled their own plug yesterday, but I deeply respect its owners’ refusal to play along to the NSA’s excessive and unconstitutional spying.
A Texas-based encrypted email service recently revealed to be used by Edward Snowden – Lavabit – announced yesterday it was shutting itself down in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users’ content. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations,” the company’s founder, Ladar Levinson, wrote in a statement to users posted on the front page of its website. He said the US directive forced on his company “a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” He chose the latter.
As a (now former) lavabit user, I appreciate his stance. However, I did not appreciate having to recover my mail from backups and then recover the pending mail from my mail relay with no warning at all. I didn’t lose anything, but damn, was that a pain in my ass.
Make sure you donate to his defense fund.
Yeah, that’s gotta be a pain. How much warning did you get, if any?
It started out as a “we’re doing disk upgrades and it’s going slow” and ended with “fuck it, shutting down.” So, um, Zero notice at all. I admire his why of it all, and I suspect the entire disk array now belongs to the feds.
So now we’ll know how well the encryption on the disk works. Real-world test time on how secure dm-crypt and LUKS are…