Meet Lavabit’s founder: An American hero hiding in plain sight

In a week or so, Julian Assange is about to get the Hollywood treatment in a big way when “The Fifth Estate” opens nationwide. (Look for a snarky review of it coming to a blog near you.) I’m sure it will paint Assange as a nerdy-smart-yet-dashing counterculture antihero, doing battle with the forces of evil instead of, say, a nerdy-smart-yet-arrogant d-bag doing battle with the forces of ego (and losing).

Meanwhile, real heroes like Ladar Levison are being overlooked. He’s taken a principled stand against government overreach and is now paying the price — yet nobody is likely to cast Benedict Cumberbatch to portray him in a movie.

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Regular readers may remember back in August, when Levison made news by publicly shutting down his Lavabit encrypted email business. Lavabits had received a surprise endorsement two months earlier, when Edward Snowden revealed he had an account with the service. Signups increased overnight by a factor of 20. The small two-person operation suddenly had more business than it could handle, along with an unexpected request it couldn’t handle: The FBI was knocking on Levison’s door, demanding the keys to his kingdom.

Levison’s story could not be told with any detail until last week when a federal court unsealed 162 pages of documents relating to his case. New York Times reporters Nicole Perlroth and Scott Shane dug into the documents, and New Yorker writers Michael Phillips and Matt Buchanan snagged an interview with Levison, who is still legally forbidden to confirm the name of the person the FBI was inquiring about. (If it’s not Edward Snowden, it must be Voldemort.)

Within the letter of the law

Let’s get something straight: Levison is not Anonymous. He has no issues about complying with limited legal requests. He has handed over information about suspects in child porn cases, for example. But the feds didn’t want just information about he-who-shall-not-be-named — they wanted access to everything. And that Levison simply couldn’t stomach.

Per the Times:

Mr. Levison was willing to allow investigators with a court order to tap Mr. Snowden’s e-mail account; he had complied with similar narrowly targeted requests involving other customers about two dozen times.

But they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much.

“You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,” Mr. Levison, 32, said in a recent interview. “In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection.”

Of course, the feds don’t take no for an answer. They obtained a court order demanding Levison hand over the encryption keys. He did — by printing out 11 pages of randomly generated numbers using a 4-point font that was difficult to scan and “largely illegible,” according to court documents.

Truth and consequences

A judge then began fining Levison $5,000 a day until he turned over the keys in digital format. Two days later he did — then promptly shut down the service. But first he offered to write code (for a fee of $3,500) that would allow the feds to intercept Snowden/Voldemort’s email metadata — and only that data. That offer was not accepted.

Now Levison is a man without a business that he had been building for 10 years and had 400,000 customers when he pulled the plug. He told the New Yorker that he might reopen the business once his appeal has made its way through the courts — if not here, then in a country like Iceland. He’s raising money for his defense and even hinted he’s trying to cook up a way to make email actually secure from the forces of evil.

One man, standing up to the U.S. government to defend a basic founding principle of our country — sounds like a great movie to me.

Do we need more people like Ladar Levison? Weigh in below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Meet Lavabit’s founder: An American hero hiding in plain sight,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.