[pvg]

A good way to regain and build trust with users would have been to acknowledge his previous mistakes. Then at least you could say "he's been around the block, done it wrong and learned how to do it right". Instead, he writes:

"In August 2013, I was forced to make a difficult decision: violate the rights of the American people and my global customers or shut down. I chose Freedom."

That isn't what happened. He chose to build and sell a supposedly secure email service that was fundamentally vulnerable to government intrusion. He then decided to play chicken with the USG over a warrant no different than ones he'd complied with previously. The completely pointless escalation forced him to compromise all of his users, something the government had not been asking for. He then shut the service down.

There are a lot of ways to describe this but 'I chose Freedom' without any acknowledgment of his previous mis-steps is both misleading and shameless. I wouldn't buy supposedly secure services from him.

[ycmbntrthrwaway]

> The completely pointless escalation forced him to compromise all of his users

How has he compromised all of his users? The service was shut down and emails kept encrypted. Am I missing something?

[pvg]

He gave up the cert, there was no PFS-only configuration, plus, presumably the FBI got to do their surveillance except instead of the target's email, they could read everyone's. So no, you are not right.

[ycmbntrthrwaway]

I was not aware he gave up the cert in the end. Thought he just closed website without disclosing TLS cert. Now it looks way worse than I imagined.

Anyway, I really hope that it leads to adoption of backward-compatible and secure email protocols. Server encryption can't be trusted anymore anyway, we need end-to-end encryption.

[pvg]

The business with the cert was just the final outcome. The initial mistake was making and selling snake oil. It is possible for someone to innocently do this, out of inexperience and ignorance.

Over time, though, it's become increasingly clear Ladar Levison is just a snakeoil salesman who misled his users. He's never acknowledged he did anything wrong. Don't fall for his posturing about 'Freedom'.

[jevinskie]

Here is an article about that:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131002/17443624734/lavab...

[Spone]

Do you have a source for these claims?

[ctrl_freak]

From what I read, he gave up the SSL cert by printing out a hard copy in a tiny font, and when he was ordered to provide a digital copy, he shut down the service.

> At approximately 1:30 p.m. CDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the F.B.I. a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the pen register. This printout, in what appears to be four-point type, consists of eleven pages of largely illegible characters.

And:

> On August 8th, rather than turning over the master key, Levison shut down Lavabit.

That was according to this article from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-lavabit-melted-do...

[tylersmith]

How big was that key? 11 pages at 4pt is a lot of characters. I wonder what encoding.

[hornetblack]

Hex maybe?

[BinaryIdiot]

To be fair you have to acknowledge how society is essentially driven through tales of one's bolstered narrative. Many consider us in a "post facts" era given how you can watch almost any politician (some far worse than others) go on live television and say something that is completely untrue but it tells a fantastic story. Elections are won based on being able to sell a narrative.

While I agree with you I think a large amount of people will buy into the narrative of him sticking up for freedom.

[KirinDave]

The extent to which these narratives work is proportional to how much we accept them. No one can stop him from telling lies but we can make sure people know they're lies.

[danielpatrick]

Source? So many hacks in this thread. Why trust any of this?

[pvg]

What's your question?