Edward Snowden was FBI's target in case that shuttered Lavabit

The US government has inadvertently revealed that the target of their attack on Lavabit was, as everyone expected, Edward Snowden , reports Wired . The NSA whistleblower has sought asylum in Russia since he revealed the NSA’s misuse of power and the extent of their surveillance program in 2013.

Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit was, under “threat of contempt and jail time”, prevented from talking about the case. However, when recently asked by Levison’s lawyers to publish the details of the case again, the FBI left in one small detail—the email ID of the person being targeted, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. Anyone with an interest in the case already suspected that Snowden was the target of the FBI’s investigation, but documents now finally confirm those suspicions.

Lavabit got dragged into the case when it was discovered that Snowden was a subscriber to Lavabit’s secure, encrypted email services. At the time, Lavabit offered secure email services to over 410,000 subscribers and the federal agents, in a quest to track down Snowden, repeatedly bombarded Lavabit with requests for access to the company’s private encryption keys.

Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, took to the media to recount the whole ordeal and to outline the immense pressure that the FBI placed the company under. Dragging the company to court multiple times, the FBI did their best to force Levison’s hand, going so far as to “permanently deny” him justice, as he puts it.

If that wasn’t enough, not only was he legally obliged to keep his mouth shut about the details of the case, even his lawyers were only afforded limited access to relevant case data. When asked by the court to present the relevant information, the FBI presented heavily redacted documents that hid their actual target and a great deal more information that they claimed would “harm their case.”

What the FBI was asking for was unfettered access to data on all of Lavabit’s customer data, not just Snowden’s. This directly infringed on customers’ privacy. As Levison puts it , the requirement for all that data is a technological limitation, given the nature of encrypted communication. As a man of principle however, Levision felt that he couldn’t stand by and let the government just walk over people’s privacy at will and made the decision to shut down his company rather than become “complicit in crimes against the American people.”