Snowden's email provider may face court rap after closing service The owner of an encrypted email service used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden could be facing contempt of court charges after refusing to hand over his users' information to spooks, according to a recent report. Ladar Levison dramatically shut down his email firm, Lavabit, after being whacked with a secret federal court order. …
Just in case the DA has forgoten, a company is a legal entity, the same as a person is a legal entity.
If the legal entity ceases to exist, how can it be held in contempt of court?
If the court order was against the company, contempt of court charges are just as irational as having a trial with a dead person as the defendant (something that still happens in russia!)
From what is known about national security letters, (see, e.g., here), they are served to a person, not a company. As nobody is allowed to say what's in those letters, one may only speculate that Levison violated the terms by publicly shutting down the service instead of secretly installing the requested back-door. Or maybe ha managed to violate part of the gag order by revealing that Lavabits was the target of the inquiry.
Much better to threaten a person instead of a company, being alone in a difficult situation is surely more scary than being threatened as part of an organization. This secret police seems to know what they are doing.
The government has to be real careful about what it does. if they per sue this, they are running a big risk. Ultimately the court case will center around if the secret court is actually lawful. What happens if it makes it all the way to the Supreme Court (which it will) and they rule that the FISA court is not a court and their actions are not lawful? All existing gag orders are null and void and the NSA has no power to do anything. EFF, ACLU and the likes will then go after the federal government and the next thing you know, you have a court ordered compliance officer being paid for by the government and monitoring their every move. The NSA will have no secrets anymore and the government won't be able to use the Patriot Act to do their bidding anymore. The government has a lot to lose by going after Lavabit. I would like to see a court review the FISA court order for Lavabit to turn over all of their customer data/records. At most they could ask for Snowden and the others that he emailed that had Lavabit email accounts.
What happens if it makes it all the way to the Supreme Court (which it will) and they rule that the FISA court is not a court and their actions are not lawful?
That seems vanishingly unlikely, even if the makeup of SCOTUS were to change dramatically.
All existing gag orders are null and void and the NSA has no power to do anything.
The NSA's authority does not derive from FISA. For one thing, the NSA was authorized in 1952, and FISA was passed in '78.
The magical Supreme Court unicorn cavalry is not going to save us from an overreaching Federal police state. SCOTUS sometimes reins in the other branches, but it's hardly consistent in that regard, and the Executive branch has not always conformed to the Court's decisions. The Court has no enforcement powers; the government obeys its dictates because playing by its own rules (sometimes, in public) lends it legitimacy. But the government retains its monopoly on authorized violence and has never been reluctant to violate its own laws if it can do so in secret. (This is, of course, true of pretty much all governments.)
There are other methods of crypto than public key/private key systems. Everyone is so focused on these methods, but alternatives exist and not every method depends on prime number factors and such. Everyone focused on key lengths and large primes could be searching down the wrong lane. Lots of ways to keep secrets.
As the dragnet for "subversive material" grows ever wider, those charged with decoding it will find that the fragmented nature of huge volumes of data starts to make decryption a matter of luck which requires vast armies of brilliant analysts (good luck with that) or expensive supercomputing resources. Which then places the onus on the securocrats to spend ever greater sums of taxpayers' cash on ever diminishing results. The NSA likes to keep their ratio of results to trawls a closely guarded secret, as does GCHQ, and it's quite likely that the reason they're in a flap about Snowden's leaks is that they show how utterly useless they are at doing what they claim is a vital job. And how terrified they are that their smoke and mirrors will be shown up as propaganda and nest feathering.. FISA courts are purely there to prevent embarrassment, conceal dubious spook budget overruns, and deter investigative journalism and oversight.
The Manning Wikileaks cables showed a majority of US diplomats and senior Armed Forces personnel to be pompous hypocritical twats with a very high opinion of themselves. Manning's show trial is designed more to scare off anyone who might dream of peeling away the threadbare veneer of democracy to show the putrid maggot-infested mess at the core..
If the Lavabit fiasco ever comes to trial, it'll be fascinating to see how those with a financial interest in maintaining the nebulous "War on Terror" decide to puff it in their pet media channels.
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