The US government is convinced that Edward Snowden did not work alone in collecting the NSA files he shared with a few journalists.
According to a new set of documents involving email service Lavabit, which was shut down last year after the feds demanded that the company share its private encryption keys, the government is examining two email accounts allegedly used by Snowden.
The two addresses, Cincinnatus@lavabit.com and edsnowden@lavabit.com, have been linked to the whistleblower and are the reason why the feds have tried to gain access to Lavabit's encryption keys, even though sharing the SSL keys would expose several hundred thousand accounts, not just Snowden's.
The file reveals that the government is interested in identifying the identities of the account users, co-conspirators, and others associated with them, including records about who created, used, and communicated through those accounts.
The warrant for Lavabit was issued last August, which stated that the company must provide any information to decrypt the content of the emails.
Lavabit's Ladar Levison complied with the ruling, after the court fined him $5,000 per day, and handed over an illegible SSL key printed on paper to the feds. After handing over the encryption keys, Levison decided to shut down the service.
While the Edsnowden@lavabit.com address is pretty self-explanatory, it appears that the whistleblower used Cincinnatus@lavabit.com to organize a “Crypto Party” in Hawaii in December 2012, around the same time that he contacted Glenn Greenwald from the same account. At this time, he was trying to teach people how to protect themselves from cyber-eavesdropping.
Edward Snowden then tried to convince Greenwald that his story was true and eventually released approximately 200,000 documents from the National Security Agency, revealing the extent of the mass surveillance apparatus created by the agency and the complete disregard for the privacy of innocent internet users.
Even though it has been almost a year since the first reports, a small number of files have been published so far and there are many more that expose the programs targeting ordinary Internet users, entire countries, politicians, non-profit organizations or global organizations.
