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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

And this reads as if someone was trying to force him to install means to spy on his users, and it wouldn't be surprising if the aim was to spy on Snowden directly (if he really used this service).

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It may be simpler than that. Even if Snowden has walked away from this service, the publicity may have attracted a lot of people the authorities find interesting, including legitimate (whatever that means) persons of interest.

The political backlash attached to slapping an NSL on "Snowden's email provider" would have looked obvious to a 5-year-old, and any real player worth its salt would have run from Lavabit as soon as it hit the news.

No, this has nothing to do with common criminals and everything to do with Snowden.

Didn't Italy nail a mob boss a few years ago because they were using a common substitution cipher?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano

Yup, that's the guy: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/mafia_boss_sec...

NSL's come with a gag order. There wouldn't have been any backlash as no one would have known about it.

He shut it down because that was the only way to legally prevent the government from spying on his users.

Good point. While controversial, this is exactly why, too. (Fed's don't want to tip their hand).

Somebody running a service like Lavabit woild be a very motivated individual, civil disobedience was a real risk.

Haven't NSL gag orders been found unconstitutional?

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/privacy/309277-judge-says-fbi...

I wonder why he didn't challenge it.

Because challenging it from a solitary confinement cell might not sound that appealing.

What I find interesting is that the lavabit homepage says that the owner has been fighting this for 6 weeks, but the reporter that released Snowden's email address did it July 13th.

The Government has been trying to get into Lavabit longer than that.

Although, perhaps they already knew that Snowden was using Lavabit and started the process immediately after his flight to HK.

His Lavabit address has been in PGP key servers since April: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x4DB8A...

That's exactly what happened. He can't afford to continue fighting the feds in court, so he's shutting everything down. His lawyer is expensive and he will go bankrupt if he stays the course.

If anyone can recommend someone who can provide counsel pro-bono let me know and I'll forward the message along.

More likely he was compelled to turn over emails relating to the case, and he doesn't want to have to be forced to do that again, so he's shutting down the service.

Possible, but unlikely given the nature of the service. It sounded like he wouldn't have been able to do that.

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