Interesting Interview With Ladar Levison of Lavabit
By Chris Gilbert
An excellent and informing interview with the founder of the Lavabit email service, who was recently involved in a legal case with the FBI, who attempted to force him to hand over SSL encryption keys. This was of course the email service used by Edward Snowden, so attracted a lot of attention. There’s some really interesting technical stuff in here, specifically about the value of perfect forward secrecy in HTTPS encryption, which he wasn’t using, and how he protected his user’s data, in many clever ways. A classic part, was when finally forced to reveal the SSL key protecting all 400,000 user’s data, he printed it out in 4 point font, to hand to the FBI agents, and then whilst they took the sealed envelope away, proceeded to completely shutdown the service, his company, and encrypt all the data onto external hard drives. Brilliant stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTe0mT1611c