Lavabit

20 Jul 2014 • lavabit.com

What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days. When the dust settled I found myself the owner of a $10,000 civil contempt fine, my business shut down, and bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it – that we all have a right to personal privacy, slipping quickly away. (To appreciate just how fast the case moved, consider the median timeframe for a similar proceedings was 9.7 months in 2012.)

The government lawyers tried to overwhelm me. In the first two weeks, I was served court orders a total of seven times – leading to contact with the FBI every other day. (This was the stretch a prosecutor would later characterize as the “long period of silence”.) It took a week for me to identify an attorney who could adequately represent me given the complex issues involved – and we were in contact for less than a day when agents served me with a summons ordering me to appear in a Virginia courtroom (over 1,000 miles from home). Two days later, after admitting their demand to my lawyer, I was served a subpoena for the encryption keys – also marking the first time they put their demand in writing.

Sad. Stuff like this makes me wish I lived somewhere in a cabin in the country… living off the land and off the grid. The few experiences I’ve had with law enforcement regarding Pastie have generally been very positive… but reading about this kind of stuff is just scary and depressing.