Snowden hunt led to shutdown of secure e-mail service Lavabit
Owner of a secure e-mail service used by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden closed his business after FBI sought access to all its users
One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find an FBI agent's business card on his Dallas doorstep.
So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end with Levison shutting the business he had spent a decade building and becoming an unlikely hero of privacy advocates in their escalating battle with the government over internet security.
It was the equivalent of asking Coca-Cola to hand over its secret formula
Prosecutors, it turned out, were pursuing a notable user of Lavabit, Levison's secure e-mail service: Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents that have put the intelligence agency under sharp scrutiny.
Levison was willing to allow investigators with a court order to tap Snowden's e-mail account; he had complied with similar, narrowly targeted requests involving other customers some two dozen times. But they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammelled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much.
On August 8 Levison closed Lavabit rather than, in his view, betray his promise of secure e-mail to his customers. The move, which he explained in a letter on his website, drew fervent support from civil libertarians but was seen by prosecutors as an act of defiance that fell just short of a crime.
The full story of what happened to Levison since May has not previously been told, in part because he was subject to a court's gag order. But on Wednesday, a US federal judge unsealed documents in the case, allowing the technology entrepreneur to speak candidly for the first time about his experiences.