The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted an amicus brief...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted an amicus brief asking the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a contempt-of-court finding against now-shuttered encrypted email service Lavabit for resisting a government subpoena and search warrant to turn over information the…
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company argued would give the government access to its customers’ sensitive information (http://bit.ly/18RN8Rr). Lavabit’s encryption service relied on HTTPS, EFF said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1eOh16D), which employs a public key to encrypt communications to a service provider and a private key to decrypt communications. Anyone can use the public key, but only the service provider can use the private key. Lavabit was worried giving the government’s its private key for access to one user’s communications would have given the government potential access to all of Lavabit’s users, according to EFF. So the company shut down and “the certificate authority GoDaddy revoked the key per standard protocol, rendering the secure site effectively unavailable to users,” EFF said. Forcing companies to turn over private keys sets a dangerous precedent, the organization said. “Obtaining a warrant for a service’s private key is no different than obtaining a warrant to search all the houses in a city to find the papers of one suspect,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. “This case represents an unprecedented use of subpoena power, with the government claiming it can compel a disclosure that would, in one fell swoop, expose the communications of every single one of Lavabit’s users to government scrutiny.” It is believed the government was seeking access to government surveillance program leaker Edward Snowden’s communications as he reportedly used Lavabit’s email service, EFF said.