An encrypted email service believed to have been used by American fugitive Edward Snowdenshut down abruptly on Thursday amid a legal fight that appearedto involve US government attempts to win access to customerinformation.
"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to becomecomplicit in crimes against the American people, or walk awayfrom nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," Lavabit LLC owner Ladar Levison wrote in a letter that wasposted on the Texas-based company's website on Thursday.
Levison said he has decided to "suspend operations" but wasbarred from discussing the events over the past six weeks thatled to his decision.
That matches the period since Snowden went public as thesource of media reports detailing secret electronic spyingoperations by the U.S. National Security Agency.
"This experience has taught me one very important lesson:without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, Iwould strongly recommend against anyone trusting their privatedata to a company with physical ties to the United States,"Levison wrote.
The US Department of Justice had no immediate comment.
Later on Thursday, an executive with a better-known providerof secure email said his company had also shut down thatservice. Jon Callas, co-founder of Silent Circle Inc, said onTwitter and in a blog post that Silent Circle had ended SilentMail.
"We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it isbest for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not receivedsubpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by anygovernment, and this is why we are acting now," Callas wrote ona blog addressed to customers.
Silent Circle, co-founded by the PGP cryptography inventorPhil Zimmermann, will continue to offer secure texting andsecure phone calls, but email is harder to keep truly private,Callas wrote. He and company representatives didn't immediatelyrespond to interview requests.
At a Moscow news conference four weeks ago, a Human RightsWatch representative said she had been contacted by Snowden froma Lavabit email address, according to news website GlobalPost.com.
Use of effective encryption by regular email users is rare.Some of Snowden's leaked documents show that Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and other large providers havebeen compelled to help intelligence authorities gather email andother data on their users.
The big providers and other companies typically offerencryption but said they cooperate with legal requests,including those by intelligence officials.
'PRETTY EXTRAORDINARY'
Lavabit was something of an outlier, in part because it hadsaid email was encrypted on its servers and could only beaccessed with the user's password.
Snowden has been charged with espionage but was grantedasylum by Russia, prompting U.S. President Barack Obama to scrapa planned meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Lavabit's statement suggested a gag order was in place, andlawyers said that could accompany any one of a wide range ofdemands for information. The government could be seekingunencrypted versions of Snowden's email correspondence, otherinformation about him, the technical means to decrypt his futureemails or those of other customers, or basic information on allof Lavabit's hundreds of thousands of users.
It is rare and perhaps unprecedented for a legitimate U.S.business to shut down rather than comply with a governmentrequest for information, said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with theElectronic Freedom Foundation, a civil liberties group in SanFrancisco that is not involved in the case.
"This is a pretty extraordinary thing," Opsahl said. "I'mnot aware of another case where a service provider elected toshut down under these kinds of circumstances."
Levison said the company has started preparing the paperworkneeded to fight in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which isbased in Richmond, Virginia. He could not be reached forcomment.
"All of this tells us the same lesson: almost nothing we doon the Internet can be protected from government prying andspying," said Michael Ratner, a U.S. lawyer who has worked foranti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, a Snowden ally. "To talkprivately, meetings will need to take place in large parks withplenty of tree cover."