Worth noting the date at which these filings commence --- early August 2013, more than month after the initial court order was generated for Snowden's account on Lavabit.<p>I'd really like to see the court orders that preceded this one. According to the timeline in the Appeals Court ruling on Levison's contempt charge, the demand for SSL/TLS encryption keys followed a month of Levison more or less baiting the FBI.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774158#up_7774823" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774158#up_7774823</a>
It's always fun reading court documents where the censors go totally overboard. Here, there are a few spots where that happens, such as where they black out the publicly available telephone and fax numbers for the various attorneys. In other spots (page 55) the attorney names are blacked out, but I'm pretty sure they're visible on the very next page (page 56).
These documents seem to back up the story that Levison, whilst obeying in past orders, did so begrudgingly.<p>"..in light of Lavabit LLC's history of failing to abide by court orders...the US needed order to compel before they complied with legal process. In fact they have incurred fines of $10,000...associated with its failure to comply with those court orders." edited - page 14
I find the oral argument on pdf pages 61ff. very intriguing...
Under the assumption that the case is about Snowden (which is not known, really, 100%), it seems like the gov't lawyers were worried about revealing that the gov't is looking into "coconspirators". The only reason they'd want to hide that is not to tip off those hypothetical coconspirators, who would necessarily work for NSA/other intelligence org, or else would be journalists whose identities we're already familiar with.<p>In the latter case, US seems to feel some shame in targeting journalists, or at least understands that the general public would not be pleased to hear that the gov't is targeting journalists in particular, especially with charges of espionage or what-have-you. But in the former case, we would be looking at a very big-brother-esque instance of the gov't being paranoid that members of the "inner circle" don't have the gov't's perceived best interests at heart, which is a legitimate concern, but also we have the gov't watching those inner circle members most closely, which is a major theme of 1984, e.g.<p>On the same note, there is something of an acute irony, or perhaps subconscious characterization of the gov't viewpoint, in the argument on pdf page 64: "because it puts those individuals ['other individuals who may now be known or unknown to the government'] on notice[—]other people who may not be the specific user of the account[—]that they should take steps because they may be within the scope of the governement's investigation". The irony here is that the government acts like it believes that <i>everyone</i> is "within the scope of [...] investigation", and it would be quite detrimental to the gov't's mass surveillance efforts if "other people" become aware that they should "take steps" to mitigate surveillance.<p>That being said, I'm not 100% confident that Snowden is the target of the Lavabit investigation, and I'm wondering if anyone is aware of any alternative speculation?