E-mail provider Lavabit LLC not only got caught up in the NSA/Edward Snowden scandal, it got taken down by it as well. And now Lavabit users have just a short window of time to get their e-mails back, says Lavabit founder Ladar Levison.
Lavabit shut down suddenly in August after essentially losing a battle with the U.S. government. Now if users want their mail back, they must log in, change their password, get a new SSL key, and tomorrow (Oct. 17) they can retrieve the messages.
Over 400,000 users have been locked out of these accounts for over two months.
The Origins of Lavabit
Lavabit was built to avoid the privacy issues that have plagued services such as Gmail. Lavabit not only didn’t parse mail so as to sell targeted ads, it used encryption it believed not even government intelligence agencies could break.
This is the type of security that led Edward Snowden to use the service, and it is this now famous users that got Lavabit in so much hot water.
Snowden used Lavabit to let reporters know about a press conference he was holding in Moscow, where he had fled. It appears that the U.S. government then issued a court order for Snowden meta data, as well as his encryption keys.
Levinson fought the order, but was under a separate gag order so he was unable to fully discuss his August 8 shut down...Read More
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