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The email service that was shut down after the FBI demanded access to Edward Snowden's email account is making a comeback:
In 2013, Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, took the defiant step of shutting down the company's service rather than comply with a federal law enforcement request that could compromise its customers' communications. The FBI had sought access to the email account of one of Lavabit's most prominent users — Edward Snowden. [...] Rather than undermine the trust and privacy of his users, Levison ended the company's email service entirely, preventing the feds from getting access to emails stored on his servers. But the company's users lost access to their accounts as well.
[...] On Friday, he's relaunching Lavabit with a new architecture that fixes the SSL problem and includes other privacy-enhancing features as well, such as one that obscures the metadata on emails to prevent government agencies like the NSA and FBI from being able to find out with whom Lavabit users communicate. He's also announcing plans to roll out end-to-end encryption later this year, which would give users an even more secure way to send email. The new service addresses what has become a major fault line between tech companies and the government: the ability to demand backdoor access to customer data.
Previously:
The Story of the Lavabit Shutdown
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MadTinfoilHatter on Monday January 23 2017, @06:08AM
Why would anyone use this service? They'll just pull another Han Solo at the first sign of being boarded
Because dumping the data under such circumstances is vastly preferable to just caving in and handing all the data to whatever TLA that requested it? In fact by doing that, he has proven himself to be far more trustworthy than the average provider. Also, if you choose to operate at a security level of "cautious" or above, with the new setup, it won't matter if he gets served. The way I see it, the only thing that could make things better, would be being based in a free country where things like national security letters don't exist.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @09:48AM
> [...] a free country where things like national security letters don't exist
Name one.
Just a single one.
Come on, I dare you to name a single government in this world which, when fighting for it's survival (1), will not unlimitedly demand anything and everything of it's country's populace and their Enterprises - and get it too, if technically possible at all (2)
(1) or any other reason it considers to be of similar importance, including "suck up to the US/Russia/China" and "he semi-publicly dissed the now-president at a long-forgotten cocktail event 15 years ago" (3)
(2) stick and carrot usually work, otherwise a baton without carrots will suffice very well, thank you
(3) actual reasoning may vary from government to government
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @11:04AM
Somalia. When there's no functional government, it cannot send national security letters.
Unfortunately the place has certain other problems …
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @12:21PM
There certainly are some countries that are not as bad as the US, the same way as there are some which are worse.
You can start with wikipedia's list of internet survillance and censorship by country for examples.
The more a country's surveillance and control infrastructure is developed, the easier it is to use the stick and carrot against its citizens - and the more they do use it. And conversely.