Lavabit complies with NSA order, then shuts down

Newly released court documents show that the former operator of a secure email service once used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been fined $10,000 for failing to give federal agents access to his customers' accounts.

Rather than comply with government demands, Ladar Levinson shut down Lavabit in August. He prefered not to be "complicit in crimes against the American people." The FBI wanted Levinson to hand over encryption keys that would have given federal agents "real time" access to not just Snowden's account, but the accounts of all 40,000 of Lavabit's customers.

"You don't need to bug an entire city to bug one guy's phone calls," he told The New York Times. "In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection."

Levinson complied with the letter of the order, but he intentionally printed them in a font designed to be hard to scan. Federal Judge Claude Hilton was not amused. He levied a fine of $5,000 per day until the keys were provided in electronic form.

"How as a small business do you hire the lawyers to appeal this and change public opinion to get the laws changed," Levinson told the NYT, "when Congress doesn't even know what is going on?"

Libertarian-leaning Rand Paul has urged voters to sign a petition against NSA spying and to donate to Campaign for Liberty, a conservative pressure group that has agreed to help fund Levinson's legal defense. Paul wrote in a statement. "I believe his legal battle is a key part in our shared fight to restore our Fourth Amendment freedoms."