Levinson did something stupid (possibly maliciously stupid, I'm not qualified to judge), the users did not do due diligence on the claims made by the service and from the looks of it Levinson is paying a price.

But that ship has sailed. He fucked up, he tried hard to limit the damage and as far as I can see he's been punished just about enough. So if you're upfront about using this as a cautionary tale then that would start with either educating users of such services or with pointing out similarities between Levinson's flawed approach and other offers of services like that. Further dumping on Levison is pointless, it's like kicking a guy that is already down.

Compare this with Karin Spaink taking on scientology knowing full well that that would bring down a lot of trouble, but doing society a great service in warning people of the dangers of that particular organization.

For users of Lavabit any kind of warning is a bit late and I think they have learned their lesson (or at least, I would hope they did).

Snake oil peddlers have been making money for years, the farmaceuticals or the broken-crypto ones look all the same from where I'm standing, they are playing with people's lives. But the ones that get caught are as far as I'm concerned neutralized, it's the ones that remain that deserve our attention, and their users as well.

What does "due diligence" by laypeople for crypto providers look like? I don't understand where you're going with this.

If you buy a climbing harness because you're going to go mountain climbing and you can't tell a good one from a piece of junk then maybe you shouldn't be climbing on mountains, no matter what the maker of the product claims.

In the end, the responsibility for your life is yours and you can't outsource that. So looking over the product you buy is a minimum requirement for things that your life depends on, just going on claims absent independent verification of those claims is for want of a better word, terribly stupid.

By analogy, if you're say, some technically adept guy that decides to screw over the NSA just using a service because it claims to be secure is probably not a good idea. In cases like that you either do it yourself or you assume that you are taking a risk.

I can't really see Snowden, working for the NSA as a layperson in this context, just as I can't see a mountaineer as a layperson when it comes to evaluating mountaineering gear.

Case in point, I worked on some pretty high structures in the gray past and I've rejected multiple 'definitely good' safety harnesses and clamps simply because they did not pass my personal standard for quality of such important gear. If I had chosen to continue and used them, and something would have happened to me because of the device failing then I would have partly blamed myself.

If crypto is of life saving importance to you then you have to know at least enough to evaluate the service and if you can't do that then either you knowingly take a risk or you should probably not be doing what you plan on doing.

My personal take on anything internet related is that since I can't predict the near future (let alone the far one) I assume that anything stored on my computers will become public one day. I suppose that even the most secure implementation available to us today is only one bug away from being wide open after all. Call me pessimistic.

One last thing about lavabit, I can see at least one very obvious way in which lavabit could have been broken that would not require Levinson's cooperation at all (but would have required a lot more foresight on the part of the NSA). In a way it is reassuring that Levinson was able to do that he did, that lowers my estimate of the NSA being able to record and store at will considerably. After all, if they can't even afford to tap the ingoing and outgoing traffic of a service that offers secure email then either they are not very good in their target selection or their resources are spent on more interesting targets and so 'little fish' like Snowden can get away with their deeds. I'm pretty sure that that hole is now plugged and I would hope that the users of similar services now know that as soon as you hit 'send' your secret is no longer.

You are trying to shift the blame to the users vs. the guy who purposefully weakened his encryption service to make it easier for end users, and also antagonized the government thus harming more users than if he wouldn't have done so. You are blaming the wrong group of people.

If you want 'ease of use' and 'bullet proof encryption' you will have to leave empty handed. Even a noob like me knows that, it's always a trade off.

So, Levinson is wrong for doing what he did, his users are wrong for believing his claims. I note that Moxie Marlinspike's critique of Lavabit was written post-takedown, it is not proven in my opinion that Levinson acted maliciously, though it is very well possible that this is the case. Even if he was only negligent there is plenty of blame for him, and by the looks of it that's hitting home hard enough for what he has done and then some.

That still does not relieve his users from their own responsibility for their part in all this. Giving data that you wish to keep from the government to a service that you are not qualified to audit and that you did not pay some service that is qualified to audit is simply dumb. No matter what the guarantees such a service is making.

Consider for instance that such a service could be set up as a front or a honeypot.

I'm sure that in your book every claim made in advertising ever was always true but I'm a bit more cynical than that.

A better argument to make is to blame the guy who acted extremely stupidly and turned over the emails of every account on his service, when he could have only exposed one.

Yes; my argument is also that Levison started with a bad hand, and then went all in with his users accounts as collateral in what was, essentially, a ludicrous bluff.

> After all, if they can't even afford to tap the ingoing and outgoing traffic of a service that offers secure email then either they are not very good in their target selection or their resources are spent on more interesting targets and so 'little fish' like Snowden can get away with their deeds.

I suspect they got trapped up in that pesky policy requirement to not wiretap American citizens on American servers hosted in American soil. I'm sure they could have figured out the technical aspects quite easily.

I'm sure the NSA is capable of wording their employee contracts in such a way that they would have a legal right to snoop on the communications of those in their employ.

Regular employers do this with impunity, for sure the NSA can do likewise. You have to be aware of the use of the service first and one reason why people a lot smarter than me suspect that that key was so important was in order to be able to decrypt past communications using the same service on captured traffic.

> I'm sure the NSA is capable of wording their employee contracts in such a way that they would have a legal right to snoop on the communications of those in their employ.

If it were that simple then the NSA would simply have provided that documentation to Levison, no?

Or, as I already said, simply scooped up his data going to/from Lavabit's servers anyways, if they felt they had the legal authority.

> Regular employers do this with impunity, for sure the NSA can do likewise.

Regular employers do this on their own systems, sure, just like every U.S. government IT system warns about the various (but not total) authorities they have to monitor your usage of government computers in many settings. But do regular employers subpoena a third-party email provider under the same IT use agreement expecting that email information to be turned over?

> You have to be aware of the use of the service first

The USG was obviously aware, otherwise they wouldn't have issued a specific subpoena to the operator of the Lavabit email service.

> people a lot smarter than me suspect that that key was so important was in order to be able to decrypt past communications using the same service on captured traffic.

Then maybe Levison should have complied with the first batch of specific warrants, where the topic of the SSL key didn't come up at all?

I mean, I can also give a self-deprecating comment but I don't think anyone has to be very smart to figure out that the SSL key wasn't even asked for until Levison made it impossible for the USG to perform their "good old fashioned police work" in any other way.

The NSA is very much not interested in directly disclosing their capabilities. It could be they already had the information but wanted parallel evidence construction.

I think the NSA farts magical bunnies, but they don't want people to know, so they breed stage magicians.