Lavabit, email service Snowden reportedly used, abruptly shuts down

The first rule of National Security Letter Club is…ah, what’s the point?

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Uhm, no. The judge specifically held that the nondisclosure provisions were unconstitutional. She stayed the ruling for 3 months, but that time would have passed by now.

Complicit in crimes against the American people? BULLSHIT. The crimes that were revealed should take precedence over the actions of a whistleblower. Plus they weren’t crimes against the American people, they were crimes against politicians and the seedy belly of corruption and a police state.

Disappointing, to say the least.

It has no impact anywhere as her decision was stayed, IIRC , pending appeal.

If it wasn’t stayed, it’d only affect Northern California.

I read “complicit in crimes against the American people” a bit differently.

What I understood Ladar to be saying was that by continuing to operate Lavabit as a puppet of the (probably) NSA, he would be committing crimes against the American people. Given the choice, he opted to simply shut down his email service.

I did not read the quoted sentence as a condemnation of Snowden’s actions.

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The Lavabit.com domain is registered with GoDaddy according to the DNS record so that doesn’t seem implausible. Random Googling shows forum posts that indicate they were using a GoDaddy cert back in 2011 as well so perhaps their website is just poorly maintained?

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I’d certainly appreciate a BB roundup of secure(ish) offshore e-mail providers. Who’s operating out of Iceland or Sweden these days?

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no news

it’s kind of bizarre how “fast” this happened. it would be interesting to know the source that the government employee/contractor read.

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There’s nothing stopping most people from using their own computers as email servers. There are logistical constraints, but it can be done.

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That was my first guess, that their SSL certificates were not well-maintained. I nevertheless ceased what I was doing and sat on my suspicions.

It remains to be seen exactly how the US government tapped into Lavabit - whether it was a backdoor in the servers or a compromised SSL certificate being forced on them.

I think it would be instructive if the Comodo SSL certificate they were supposed to have, were examined for what methods it supported, and whether PFS was one of them, and the GoDaddy certificate examined for what methods it supported (I seem to recall a 256 bit RC4 key off the top of my head but this was weeks ago and I haven’t inspected that cert deeply since then)

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If you’re in the US, that’s an awful idea. The NSA and others have had no problem getting the ISPs like comcast to comply.

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Thanks, Obama.

I’m not sure about the Hope, but there’s some Change, right?

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NSA issuing a secret order to Comcast has nothing to do with your computer at home. Sure they could ask Comcast to snoop your packets but they’ve apparently already been doing that for years. But running a private mail server in your bedroom at least gives you the opportunity to set up a dead man’s switch to turn the hard drives into slag. Not that I expect this would work… I’m pretty sure Comcast blocks port 25 for residential customers.

It’s an extremely difficult problem when there is nothing you can trust… not your ISP, not a remote server, and not any of the routers between you and a remote server. It’s really starting to feel like TOR is the only answer (which still isn’t bulletproof).

Someone ought to re-write that song from Team America. Change the lyrics from “America, fuck yeah!” to “America, fuck you!”

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I came here to ask this. What email providers exist that are reliable, share information only after a court order and can guarantee their servers locations are outside of the US? I’d prefer the servers are in Canada, but I’d settle for disclosure about which jurisdictions they are subject to.

As @xzzy pointed out, I was referring to using your own personal computer’s resources- not an ISP. I’ve been able to use port 25 from home before, but it doesn’t really matter, there are workarounds if you can’t. Encryption and Amdahl’s Law solves the sniffing problem.

The operator of Lavabit could always follow Snowden’s example and say fuck the gag order, expose everything to the light of day.

He acts like he is taking a courageous and principled stand by shutting down Lavabit. Really he is just being a pussy and worrying about what will happen to himself.

Who are you to say that someone should sacrifice themselves for the greater good? What moral right do you have to demand such a thing?

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Tell the whole world that doing business in the US is a bad idea

The rest of the world has been figuring that out for a while now.

What we need is for this to somehow get traction in mainstream media.

Most of the corporatists that own the MSM are the same people that want Snowden and other patriotic whistleblowers to go away in the first place.

Probably our best bet in our struggle for a representative democracy in the USA is by taking action in other ways. Also, more whistleblowing.

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Really? You’re trash talking a guy for not risking life imprisonment? What if he has children or a wife or someone else that depends on him to be available to provide shelter and food?

Without knowing the details behind his decision you really have no place to be making judgements.

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What have you sacrificed lately?

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