You may have heard the story on NPR: How Snowden’s Email Provider Tried To Foil The FBI Using Tiny Font by Eyder Peralta.
From the story:
Right before Edward Snowden told the world it was he who had leaked information about some of the government’s most secret surveillance programs, the FBI was hot on his trail.
One of the places agents looked was Lavabit, the company that hosted Snowden’s email account. As we told you back in August, Lavabit shuttered its service, saying it could not say why because a government gag order was issued.
The insinuation was clear: Lavabit had been served with a so-called national security letter, in which the FBI demands information about a user, but the service provider isn’t allowed to tell the user or anyone else that it was even asked about this.
On Wednesday, the documents filed (pdf) with the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia were unsealed. Even though Snowden’s name is redacted, we can surmise this concerns him because of the charges against the person and the timing of the investigation. Perhaps more importantly, however, the documents give us detail of what’s usually a secret process. And it illuminates how Ladar Levison, Lavabit’s owner, tried to fight the government’s request for information on one of his users and then a subsequent request for an encryption key that would allow agents to read the communication of all its users.
After a bizarre back and forth, Ladar Levison was forced to give up the encryption key.
What puzzles me is why ask for the encryption key at all? Can’t the FBI ask the NSA to use its $billions in hardware/software and encryption standard corruption skills just to decrypt Snowden‘s emails?
Or on its own, can the FBI only use non-scrambled phone communications and plain text emails?
If that is the case, then something as simple as ROT13 will defeat the FBI.
To clue the FBI in on why sharing with the NSA is a one-way relationship – the NSA puts the FBI, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, etc., all in the “semi-adversary” camp.
They don’t trust other government departments any more that they trust U.S. citizens.
Just remember the next time the Director of National Intelligence says “adversary,” to the NSA, that includes your name along with all other non-NSA groups, organizations, departments and people.
If the FBI won’t intervene to save us, maybe it will intervene to save itself.