Sure, Lavabit is taking a stand on privacy, but didn’t Snowden once say “we’re a nation of laws?” It’s not like the FBI raided the Lavabit office and absconded with the servers. There was a court-approved search warrant. That’s the law.
The U.S. government in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents.
The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata, defined as “information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication.”
The name of the target is redacted from the unsealed records, but the offenses under investigation are listed as violations of the Espionage Act and theft of government property — the exact charges that have been filed against NSA whistleblower Snowden in the same Virginia court.
In defiance of the government, Lavabit is being penalized $5000 per day. Wow.