It turned out that the FBI did target the secure email service Lavabit specifically to spy on Edward Snowden. A few years ago, the founder of the email service Ladar Levison was served a sealed order that forced him to help the FBI in its surveillance of Edward Snowden.
Lavabit, the email service that accounted for 410,000 users, was founded on a basis of private communications secured by encryption. Its creator was ordered to install a surveillance package on his servers and to provide the encryption keys to enable the FBI to read the most secure messages. Moreover, Ladar Levison was ordered not to disclose this fact to anyone. The service owner spent more than a month on legal fighting, a court appearance, subpoena and appeals, and then decided to shut down Lavabit saying that he doesn’t want to be “complicit in crimes against the US people”.
It’s been more than two years, and now it is clear that Edward Snowden did use that email service for his secure communications. It has just been made clear that the reason the Federal Bureau of Investigation forced Lavabit to shut down was to spy on Snowden. Transparency organization Cryptome published documents obtained from the federal court, proving that “Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com” was the intended target of the action against the email service. The information was released after legal action from the email service creator, who has been trying to lift himself from his order of silence and tell the world what really happened. Finally, in December 2015, the court allowed to release the files within the case, including the identity of the subscriber redacted. According to the documents, Snowden’s email address was left unredacted. Although Ladar Levison is still under order of silence, the redaction error has confirmed the leaker of the NSA files was the target.
Posted by: SaM
Date: Monday, March 21st, 2016
http://extratorrent.cc/article/4895/fbi+targeted+lavabit+to+spy+on+snowden.html