[lmm]

> What I don't like is how the government demands to wiretap EVERY person's account regardless of there being no suspicion of crime in every account. How can that be justified? To stop future whistleblowers?

The article is giving a one-sided account. The government issued a (presumably valid) warrant to intercept messages on a specific user's account. He had designed the system such that he couldn't provide that access except by providing his keys to everything, and at first attempted to bill the government for building a system that would let him grant access to individual accounts.

[throw2016]

Just wondering. Your first comment on this thread claimed the warrant was looking for child porn which was immediately corrected in the reply suggesting you only have a passing acquaintance to the case.

Now in this reply you seem to know much more about the case so why make the false accusation about child porn in the first comment?

[lmm]

I followed the case in detail at the time (back in 2014) but haven't read about it since then. I must have misremembered the child porn aspect (my memory was vague enough that I did say "IIRC", for whatever that's worth). I don't know what you want me to say other than "human memory is fallible".

[desbest]

No. Lavabit could have programmed a backdoor into their web interface using the private keys that allows access to only one account, but the US government wasn't happy with that.

[res0nat0r]

Sorry but that is exactly the opposite of what happened.

From the first paragraphs:

> 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.”

https://www.wired.com/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed

[ambulancechaser]

Someone already replied, but this is exactly opposite what happened as stated. The US government wanted access to only one particular user. The infrastructure did not allow this, and the guy behind Lavabit objected because a single key regulated everything, including server management. He offered to hand over the things that USG requested, which was obviously denied as they could not be sure he was handing over everything. The US government had a valid warrant and was willing to pay for re-keying after they were done. This to me seemed straightforward. He did not have the system setup so that the data was unavailable to him, so why could the government not subpoena the data that existed and was available?