Two months ago, Lavabit was abruptly shut down. The email service that was known to have been used by Edward Snowden was shut down for this reason, as we later learned. As is known, the FBI asked Levison (the owner of the site) to hand over the encryption keys of his website so that they could get the information in real time. Levison rejected the FBI's proposal for a custom encoding that would allow them to access the information that was being exchanged daily. Levison, unable to do otherwise, handed over the keys, but in a form that was not at all convenient for the FBI. He handed them 11 pages of very tiny font, as Forbes reports.
"I intentionally chose a font that would be difficult to scan digitally (OCR). I wanted them to have to enter it by hand," Levison said in an interview last week.
The FBI complained, and Levison “won” a fine of $5,000 a day for contempt of court. So when he turned over the keys in digital form two days later, he had to pay $10,000. If you visit https://www.lavabit.com today, you will receive the following message.
This was thanks to GoDaddy – Lavabit's hosting company, which withdrew the encryption keys after Levison handed them over to the FBI.
"The company was forced to revoke the certs when we realized that the private key had been shared with a third party and could therefore be used to monitor and decrypt our communications," said GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth L. Driscoll.
Source: secnews.gr
