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Comment by deepnet | Hacker News Reader

So Ladar Levinson closed his company because he refused to provide a backdoor to his customers email encryption ?

This seems similar to the Apple case, was Tim Cook just too big to bully ?

Snowden had his own encryption or used GPG so a Lavabit backdoor encryption key would not lower the entropy of Snowden's encryted emails.

Was Levinson's gag order lifted ? Why did Lavabit have to close but Apple didn't ?

[EDIT] Levison was not jailed.

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Ladar Levinson was never arrested or jailed, and he chose (to his credit) to shut down his own company instead of complying with a court order.

He does comply for the record. He've just sent his key on printed paper in place of usb stick.

The key was printed using a font that was too small to be readable by any means.

I thought it was readable, just very unwieldy.

He complied with previous warrants, right? And since he didn't use PFS, when he finally did hand over his key, it put all previous requests at risk. The problem was representing more security then he actually had.

The security provided was fully within the threat model presented, which never considered this type of attack.

You can't really jail Tim Cook if all the engineers quit because they refused to write a backdoor

Would they?

At least some of them threatened to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryptio...

Big difference between 'might' and 'would' there. My point is that if the company wanted it, it would not matter if some engineers had a problem. Fortunately the company stood up since this case was never truly about this one particular phone.

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