How can you not love this guy? Please donate to his defense fund:<p><a href="http://tinyurl.com/m65n4ko" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/m65n4ko</a><p><a href="http://lavabit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://lavabit.com/</a><p>Lavabit Legal Defense Fund
10387 Main Street, Suite 205
Fairfax, VA 22030
(703) 291-1999
Wouldn't the FBI have the technical capability to use optical character recognition to digitise the keys to actual text? Or maybe it's too small to be legible to a high DPI scanner? I really admire Lavabit here, they're not dealing with your average Joe, they're dealing with the American Government and that costs money. Everyone has the chance to help potentially make history by supporting Lavabit and donate to its legal fund.<p>Many would have just given up the moment things escalated, but Ladar Levison never gave in and fought for the privacy of his users at the cost of his profitable business and life. The cards are stacked against him, but he didn't let it get in the way of trying to fight the case and have it made publicly.<p>How many other companies have secretly complied with similar requests we don't know about? United States of America, the land of the free, right?
Not totally related:<p>It remind me of the case of "Free" a French ISP, they were forced like others ISP to send to the government the customer information related to IPs caught on P2P networks [0].<p>But the law did not specified how the data had to be sent, so to troll the government they sent everything by fax. And the volume was around multiple thousand queries a day.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law</a>
Once again, if you want to support Lavabit, please donate to the defense fund either at <a href="http://lavabit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://lavabit.com/</a> or <a href="https://rally.org/lavabit" rel="nofollow">https://rally.org/lavabit</a>.
Other wonderful delivery methods:<p>- Baked into cuneiform<p>- Wax tablets. "Oh, sorry, it got hot in my car and they're a little runny..."<p>- In the form of a crossword puzzle.<p>- Knitted into a scarf. "Perl one, skip two..."<p>Best to have hardware from which it is impossible to export a key.
<i>Wired Magazine details the ordeal</i><p>From the HN guidelines:<p>'Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.'
This was already discussed at length earlier today <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6487969" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6487969</a>
Small moves like that makes me proud to be on the internet at this day and age of crisis. I hope I can tell my children or grand children that I actually cared and that I made a small difference, even if it's only the smallest of all.<p>I hope it will stay the way it is. Probably not, seeing how the public is ignoring and/or is not caring about the issue at all.
If my understanding is correct, the FBI could decrypt historical traffic if they had the keys. So, assuming the FBI/NSA has a huge archive of Lavabit's customer traffic (would not surprise me), couldn't they decrypt it all now since they have the SSL keys?
>To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2,560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data<p>That would take an intern less than an hour to digitize. Maybe three interns if you needed redundancy. This seems like a completely useless action on Levison's part since it end up giving the FBI the information they wanted but will still piss them off.
>>"To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2,560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data," prosecutors complained.<p>That's pretty misleading - they make it sound like if they press the wrong key once it'll destroy the FBI's entire system.
Off topic, but brings to mind another technique famously used by Goldman when they dumped over a billion pages to the 50 staffers in the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission:<p><a href="http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=00000065-0000-0000-6ef7-1a0000000000" rel="nofollow">http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=00000065-0000...</a>
Clever. We did something similar for a friend getting married. Instead of giving his present directly we created a text file encrypted with his public pgp key. We printed out the ascii-armored cryptotext and handed it over. He had lots of fun typing it back into his computer.
I think he should have encrypted the key using itself. That way he can give them the key. And they can decrypt it and send it back in time so they can decrypt it.