Snowden's email provider, Lavabit, shutters citing legal pressure

An email provider reportedly used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shut down on Thursday, citing an ongoing court battle that it could not discuss.

Lavabit, which launched in 2004, specialized in providing a high-security email service that employed advanced encryption. It was designed to thwart the kind of surveillance techniques that Snowden revealed in June were used by the U.S. government.

Snowden used a Lavabit email address to invite people to a press conference at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow on July 12, according to a report from the international wire service Global Post.

Lavabit founder Ladar Levison wrote that he couldn't describe the legal machinations under way. "As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests," he wrote in a front-page notice on his website.

Levison wrote that Lavabit has "started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company."

Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in an interview that there are many statutes that could be used by the government to prevent Lavabit from describing its legal situation.

"What we need here is more transparency to have a real debate around government surveillance powers," Opsahl said. "It would be great to have Lavabit to be able to participate in a national discussion we are having right now on surveillance powers."

Snowden, who remains in Russia after being granted asylum for one year, is wanted by the U.S. for passing documents to media outlets such as the Guardian and Washington Post that described anti-terrorism surveillance projects conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

The documents revealed arrangements with major companies such as Microsoft, Google and Verizon to turn over email and Internet-related data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Lavabit's website is largely offline, but Google's cache still has a copy of its description of how its service worked. Lavabit used three encryption schemes to scramble email based around Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC).

E-mail is encrypted before it is sent to the company's servers. The result of the encryption process means that a message is, in theory, cryptographically impossible to read without a password, Lavabit wrote.

"We say cryptographically impossible because, in theory, an attacker with unlimited computing resources could use brute force to decipher the original message," according to the description.

It appears from the description that Lavabit only retains a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) representation of a person's password. The hash, even if it was obtained by investigators with a court order, would likely not be of use to investigators seeking to decrypt Snowden's email.

Lavabit warned that the encryption's strength also relies heavily on a secure password selected by a user. Attackers could also intercept a message in transit if SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption is not used for the communication between a user and Lavabit's servers. Unencrypted messages could also be potentially pulled from a user's hard drive.

"Our goal was to make invading a user's privacy difficult, by protecting messages at their most vulnerable point," Lavabit wrote. "That doesn't mean a dedicated attacker, like the United States government, couldn't intercept the message in transit or once it reaches your computer."

Levison could not immediately be reached for comment. In closing, he wrote: "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

Snowden's Icelandic citizenship request stuck until September

Several members of the Icelandic Parliament introduced a bill Thursday that seeks to grant Icelandic citizenship to U.S. National Security Agency document leaker Edward Snowden, but the bill won't be discussed until September.

On Thursday, Snowden formally filed a request for citizenship to the Icelandic Parliament, according to Birgitta Jónsdóttir, member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Icelandic Pirate Party.

Snowden, who disclosed secret information about the data collection programs of the NSA, had his passport revoked by the U.S. government and is believed to be in the transit area of the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow since flying there from Hong Kong almost two weeks ago.

With assistance from a legal advisor to WikiLeaks, Snowden has requested political asylum from more than 20 countries, including Iceland, but none of the requests have been granted so far. Some countries have already rejected the requests on different grounds, including the fact that their laws require asylum requests to be made on their soil.

The Icelandic Parliament has the power to grant Icelandic citizenship by law in special circumstances, including for humanitarian reasons. In 2005 it granted citizenship to American chess grand master Robert James Fischer, known as Bobby Fischer, after the U.S. government revoked his passport due to an outstanding arrest warrant against him for violating economic sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia in 1992.

"The parliament has finally received a request for citizenship from Mr. Snowden and many of the parliamentarians believe it is their duty to offer Mr Snowden shelter, for his U.S. passport has been stripped from him and he has been left de-facto stateless by his own government," Jónsdóttir said Thursday in a blog post. "The parliamentarians and many Icelanders share the same concerns as Amnesty International that if extradited to the U.S. Mr Snowden could be at risk of ill-treatment and possibly a subject of torture."

 

Jónsdóttir, together with four other Icelandic MPs representing the Pirate Party, the Left-Green Movement, Bright Future, and the Social Democratic Alliance, introduced a bill on Thursday in parliament to grant Snowden citizenship. Thursday was the last day of meetings before the parliament went on recess.

"The reason for the delay in putting forward the bill is that the parliament had not received a formal request from Snowden until today," Jónsdóttir said.

The Icelandic Pirate Party MPs tried to get the bill sent to a parliamentary committee for evaluation and discussion in the evening, but the majority of the parliament voted against it, said Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir, an assistant to the Icelandic Pirate Party MPs, speaking in a personal capacity. "They were not proposing a discussion of the bill in parliament last night, but only to send it to the relevant committee."

The bill's status is still pending, but the parliament will be in recess until the beginning of September so there will be no discussion until then, a spokeswoman for the Icelandic Parliament said.

It's still possible for the bill to be discussed and voted on by the parliament in September, but it's not clear if other options will be explored until then. The Pirate Party MPs have not had a chance to discuss what to do in the meantime, Ámundadóttir said.

"I can assure you this is not the end of this case," said via email Páll Valur Björnsson, an Icelandic MP for the Bright Future party who also sponsored the bill.

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Analysis: Snowden's options appear to narrow in bid to evade U.S. arrest

A television screen shows former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden during a news bulletin at a cafe at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport June 26, 2013.

WASHINGTON/MOSCOW - Nearly a month after Edward Snowden exposed top secret U.S. surveillance programs, the former spy agency contractor looks no closer to winning asylum to evade prosecution at home - and his options appear to be narrowing.

Stuck in legal limbo in a Moscow airport transit area and facing uncertainty over whether any of the destinations he is said to be contemplating - Ecuador, Venezuela and Cuba - will let him in, Snowden seems to be at the mercy of geopolitical forces beyond his control.

Unseen in public since arriving in Moscow last weekend, much remains unclear about Snowden's overtures to various countries and how they have responded behind the scenes.

Russia may no longer have sufficient reason to continue harboring Snowden if, as is widely believed, its intelligence services have already questioned him about the classified documents that he has admitted to taking from the National Security Agency.

The leftist government of Ecuador, already sheltering WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its London embassy, is reviewing Snowden's asylum request, though officials have sent mixed signals, suggesting the process could drag on for weeks.

Venezuela's new president, Nicolas Maduro, has spoken favorably of granting refuge to Snowden but has taken no action, and he may think twice about risking a setback in tentative steps toward post-Chavez rapprochement with Washington.

And even if Ecuador or Venezuela decide to take Snowden, there is no guarantee that communist Cuba, the likely transit point for any flight from Moscow to those South American countries, would let him pass through and further complicate its own thorny relations with the United States.

Adding to Snowden's troubles, the Obama administration, embarrassed by his disclosures on U.S. surveillance programs and his ability to dodge extradition when he fled Hong Kong last Sunday, is bringing heavy pressure to bear on any country that might consider accepting him, diplomats say.

"Thus far, he has chosen his destinations carefully," said Carl Meacham, a foreign policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "His time, even in those countries, however, may be running out."

Another potential complication is the role of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, whose alliance with Snowden further politicizes his case. British legal researcher Sarah Harrison, a top WikiLeaks lieutenant and Assange confidante, escorted Snowden on the flight from Hong Kong to Moscow and is believed to have remained with him.

FOCUS ON RUSSIA

Russia remains the chief focus of the diplomatic scramble, and while President Vladimir Putin has clearly delighted in the chance to tweak Washington, there are questions whether he wants a prolonged saga that threatens deeper damage to already-chilly U.S.-Russia relations.

The former NSA contractor's trek took him to Moscow because he had little choice of any other route that would keep him relatively safe from his American pursuers, former Russian intelligence officers and political and security analysts said.

"He has almost nowhere to go. He does not have much of a choice," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs and a member of an influential foreign policy council.

"Considering that he came out with a serious statement that is seen by the United States as treasonous, he needs to lay out an itinerary through countries where he can feel more or less certain that he will not be handed over."

Despite Putin's insistence that Russian intelligence agencies had not been "working with" Snowden, a Russian security service source said they would certainly have interviewed him.

U.S. authorities are already operating on a "worst case" assumption that all of the classified material in Snowden's possession has made its way to one or more adversary intelligence services, U.S. national security sources said.

While top U.S. officials have warned of serious damage to national security interests from Snowden's leaks, Lukyanov suggested that in intelligence terms he was probably not a very valuable prize. "He is not some kind of special agent," he said.

Putin has built his return to the presidency on strident nationalism. If he hands Snowden back to the United States, he could face a backlash from Russians who see the American as a whistle-blowing hero.

"No matter what, we should not give him back. Let him go somewhere, or even stay in Russia - we are a big country and we have room for him as well as (French actor Gerard) Depardieu," said Viktor, a pensioner who was at Sheremetyevo airport on Friday for a vacation flight to Ukraine.

CONFUSION OVER ECUADOR

However, Snowden's protracted stay at the Moscow airport may have more to do with his problems reaching a deal with Ecuador than with any Russian desire to keep the American fugitive from moving on, the Russian security source said.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has inserted his small Andean nation into the saga by offering asylum to Snowden, whom he has praised for exposing U.S. espionage efforts. However, he may also be trying to fill the void left by the death of Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez - for a decade Washington's most vocal adversary in the region.

While Ecuador seems like Snowden's best bet as a place of refuge, its intentions are unclear.

Assange said earlier that Ecuadorean diplomats in London had issued a temporary travel document intended for Snowden, whose U.S. passport had been revoked. But the Quito government denied this.

In the meantime, Correa has said Ecuador cannot move forward with the asylum request until Snowden is in the country or makes his way to one of its embassies. Correa has indicated he is not planning to arrange transit for Snowden.

Returning to Quito on Friday from a tour of Asia, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his government had been involved in talks with the Russian government about Snowden's fate, but without any result.

For now, Venezuela also was not looking promising for Snowden. Maduro has made clear several times that he would take a positive view of an asylum request, though he said on Thursday that "no one has asked us for humanitarian refuge."

Since taking office in April, Maduro has at times used thunderous, Chavez-style, anti-U.S. rhetoric but he has also expressed interest in better relations with Washington.

Without help from a sympathetic government, Snowden's ability to travel is limited. The increasingly grim predicament may explain why his father on Friday said he is reasonably confident the 30-year-old Snowden would return if certain conditions were met.

Those conditions include not detaining Snowden before trial, not subjecting him to a gag order and letting him choose the location of his trial, according to a letter that Lonnie Snowden's lawyer, Bruce Fein, sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.