The article was about Lader Levision, and his 9 month battle with the FBI, and how he was forced into shutting down his e-mail company which he ran for 10 years.[1] He tells the paper that this all started off with the Federal agent coming to his door, and showing him a court order that requested him to consent to installing surveillance equipment on Lavabit’s network.[2] The surveillance equipment, allowed the FBI to get access to all of the messages –to and from all of his customers.[3]  Afterwards, the Federal agents were requesting his company’s private encryption codes of his customers.[4] The encryption code had his customer’s password, so he was very hesitant to give.[5] When he refused to give what the FBI wanted, he was held in contempt of a federal order and faced a court case in which neither he nor his lawyer had any background information about.[6] However, Lader Levision told the CBC that he would have gave up the identity of the account holder, if the federal agent has asked him directly who they were looking for, instead of asking for all his 410, 000 customers user passwords.[7] So he decided to shut down his company, rather than hand over the encryption code.[8] Even today, he still can’t say who or what the FBI was investigating for, but he thinks the reason why the Federal agent wanted the password in the first place, is because of Snowden.[9]
After this incident, Levision claimed “he is worried his service could be used to hide criminal behaviour but he believes the government should target investigations against only individuals’ part of the investigation, rather than all of his customers.â€[10] With that being said, he feels that, what he had gone through was unjust, and the government should’ve dealt it in a different way.[11]  Nevertheless,in the future Lader Levision intends to start a new service which has secured interface that helps people to protect their privacy, especially with people worried about their security.[12]
[1-12] Lavabit founder fought 9-month legal battle with FBI (CBCnews)
By: News, CBC. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lavabit-founder-fought-9-month-legal-battle-with-fbi-1.2658374
Requesting the information of all 410,000 customers is absurd. I commend Mr. Levision for digging in his heels and protecting the privacy of his customers. The actions of the FBI is somewhat reminiscent of the “kettling†technique used by Toronto Police during the G20 summit in 2010.