Warrant for the account of a Lavabit customer | Hacker News Reader

Warrant for the account of a Lavabit customer

ia600908.us.archive.org

42 pointslwf16 comments

I don't think they're shutting down over this warrant. This warrant doesn't seem to be related to Snowden as it was executed on March 28 - http://ia800908.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.2362... Snowden's expose didn't happen until April/May

It seems a case about Child Pornography - http://ia800908.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.2362...

A Gag order would have come with a National Security related incident

Why does it need to be about Snowden? We haven't even verified that he actually owned an account.

Giving up the private details of a pedophile is not "to become complicit in crimes against the American people", which is what the Lavabits letter stated. So it's natural for us to infer something relating to the Snowden revelations.

Says you. That could be exactly what he meant.

He most likely did:

>> Snowden invited rights workers to a July meeting from the address "edsnowden@lavabit.com," according to a human rights specialist who attended the meeting

http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/8/4602966/email-service-used-...

Greenwald verified it: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/365560955746267137

Yep.

Does this submission intend to discredit Lavabit's decision to shutdown? Looks a bit.. disinfo-ish, but I'd rather give the submitter benefit of the doubt.

That was not my intention. I just came across it and thought it was an interesting find.

Despite being completed on 10 June, it was just uploaded earlier today.

If you notice this does have a gag order attached to it, specifically item 31 in the link you provided. Gag orders aren't just for NSLs.

Exactly. This request specifically asks for protection under 2705(b) which grants a limited gag for up to 90 days if the publication of the warrant execution could lead to destruction of evidence or flight from prosecution. The power granted under 2705(b) last only 90 days and must be reauthorized if it is to be extended.

The scary thing about an NSL is that there is no automatic time limit to the gag order it creates, and due process to request the gag to be lifted is severely limited. In other words, not only don't we know about the NSLs issued, we don't even know when we might get a chance to know about them which makes any oversight of their use practically impossible.

This is not what lavabit is shutting down over:

>Court records show that, in June, Lavabit complied with a routine search warrant targeting a child pornography suspect in a federal case in Maryland. That suggests that Levison isn’t a privacy absolutist. Whatever compelled him to shut down now must have been exceptional.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/lavabit-snowden/

That's the way it's supposed to work.

The police can and should be able to get warrants to aid in the prosecution of crime, with the oversight of an impartial judge interpreting the validity of the request.

My guess at the scenario:

This Joey006 warrant was "turn over everything you have for this email". Okey dokey, it's all encrypted, here you go. The thing they shut down over was a request to build in a backdoor that bypasses encryption altogether.

So a valid warrant with a judge's oversight on the public record? Isn't this what we're arguing should be happening for internet searches?

Is this what they are shutting down over? It seems like its a fairly standard warrant and quite limited in scope for both the seizure and the gag period. I'm not quite sure what 4th amendment fight there would be over this.

This is an old warrant from April of this year. It's highly probably that this is not the reason for the shutdown. We can't know for sure since Lavabit's founder is, according to him, under gag order.

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