How Lavabit Melted Down

The system did serve sider encryption and decryption. Lavabit has, in the past, complied with court orders for data. They have access to the data. This is the fundamental problem with Lavabit.

It's rather unclear why they didn't comply with the initial court order in this case which was just for data on Snowden's account, but it's clear they could have complied (though maybe not as quickly as the Fed's wanted) and that they have in the past.

So, if you are contemplating using Lavabit II, keep in mind that sooner or latter it will get a lawful court order for data from whatever jurisdiction it's in. Either it will comply with it --- in which case it's street cred is worthless --- or it will refuse with the same apparent "fuck the police" bravado everyone likes , leading to the same set of escalations that happened here. The end of that is either/all of 1) the service failing because of computer seizure/the founder being held in contempt so he can't maintain it 2) Him caving and handing over keys again or 3) him shutting down the service to prevent 2.

None of these are good. If the court order is targeted at you, there is a decent chance your data is handed over. If it's not, there is a decent chance your data is still handed over or the service goes under.

Oh, and lastly, if your worried about the NSA's dragnet surveillance, they can just hack a foreign server.

Don't rely on non-end-to-end secure systems.

Your argument starts with the premise that the government is always entitled to data on particular individuals being investigated, and all other values must always be sacrificed to that end. Your review of the costs imposed, however, recognizes only the wiretapping of "every other user".

There is also an additional price paid, which is even more significant and unfortunately not recognized in your argument nor even in Leveson's arguments in the case. The SSL private key is not only for encryption, it also is designed to authenticate the server to the user. Thus, revealing it enables the additional party to impersonate the server owner online. (In this case, the impersonation would have taken the form of a compromised server, no longer under the owner's control, purporting to be the uncompromised server still under the owner's control.)

The evil comes in with the combination of this demand and the gag order. If the server owner could either keep the key secret or warn the users, this evil could not happen - but when both are prohibited, he is forced to enable the third party to lie to the users and make his server a fraud.

Accordingly, my view is that one of these things must yield - either the secret key demands or the gag orders. This is a higher social value than the wiretapping of persons alleged to be suspected of crimes ("alleged" because the secrecy of the process prevents the citizens verifying that the government has any legitimate grounds at all).