{"id":2540,"date":"2014-02-11T21:12:07","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T21:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncjolt.org\/?p=2540"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:53:56","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T20:53:56","slug":"the-last-stand-of-lavabit-a-case-to-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/blogs\/the-last-stand-of-lavabit-a-case-to-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Stand of Lavabit: A Case to Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

The details of government surveillance programs brought to light in the wake of Edward Snowden\u2019s NSA leaks have already spawned multiple lawsuits.\u00a0 Klayman v. NSA<\/i> was filed literally the day after the first revelations came out in The Guardian<\/i>.\u00a0 US District Judge Richard Leon called the government’s spying technology “almost Orwellian” in his widely cited opinion<\/a>.\u00a0 He rejected the government’s key legal precedent a 1970s case that allowed the police to track numbers called from a single phone (Smith v. Maryland<\/i>) and found that bulk data collection is likely unconstitutional.\u00a0 Judge William Pauley, a federal district judge in New York, reached the polar opposite conclusion mere days later.\u00a0 He found that phone numbers dialed are simply not protected under the Fourth Amendment and, accordingly, dismissed a complaint filed by the ACLU for lack of standing.\u00a0 A third case challenging NSA surveillance, Jewel v. NSA<\/i><\/a>, has been briefed and is currently awaiting a decision in district court.
\nA somewhat parallel case is currently also awaiting adjudication at the Fourth Circuit.\u00a0 Once it became clear that Snowden used an email server, Lavabit<\/a>, designed to make it impossible to track a single user the FBI promptly shut it down<\/a>.\u00a0 Once they learned that they could not track an individual target, federal agents demanded Lavabit’s private SSL key<\/a>, which would effectively give them the “keys to the kingdom”\u2014the ability to monitor every Lavabit user, in real time.\u00a0 The site\u2019s founder has consistently maintained that he is willing to help law enforcement track a specific target.\u00a0 He was, however, unwilling to provide law enforcement carte blanche access to the metadata of hundreds of thousands of users\u2014which would be the pragmatic effect of handing over the private SSL key.\u00a0 He was then given an ultimatum:\u00a0 hand over the SSL key or pay $5,000 per day.\u00a0 Levison elected to shut down the service, deleting the e-mails belonging to about 400,000 users, including his own.<\/p>\n

Both the litigation initiated against the NSA and Levison\u2019s appeal could pose huge implications for one the most pressing issues of cloud computing era: how much can the government rely on precedence promulgated in the 1970s in the age of the telephone in their use of powerful and far-reaching digital surveillance programs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Levison\u2019s case will not be directly affected legally by the other NSA litigation, Levison’s appeal covers many of the same grounds upon which the NSA litigation rests.\u00a0 In Levison\u2019s case, the FBI is arguing that what they want to install on Levison\u2019s e-mail service is essentially just a “pen register<\/a>.”\u00a0 This provides a similar legal justification to the NSA\u2019s domestic dragnet data mining program\u2014metadata<\/a> is not constitutionally protected by the Fourth Amendment.\u00a0 Both lines of litigation could pose huge implications for one the most pressing issues of cloud computing era: how much can the government rely on precedence promulgated in the 1970s in the age of the telephone in their use of powerful and far-reaching digital surveillance programs.\u00a0 At least one of these cases is likely to end up before the Supreme Court.\u00a0 For this reason, the outcome of Levison\u2019s appeal is worth watching.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The details of government surveillance programs brought to light in the wake of Edward Snowden\u2019s NSA leaks have already spawned multiple lawsuits.\u00a0 Klayman v. NSA was filed literally the day after the first revelations came out in The Guardian.\u00a0 US District Judge Richard Leon called the government’s spying technology “almost Orwellian” in his widely cited …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7506,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions\/7506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}