Ladar Levison
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Type of site
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Webmail |
|---|---|
| Owner | Lavabit LLC |
| Created by | Ladar Levison |
| Website | lavabit |
| Alexa rank |
 881,624 (January 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required |
| Launched | 2004 |
| Current status | Online |
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Content license
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Open-source (mail server) |
Lavabit is an open-source encrypted webmail service, founded in 2004. The service suspended its operations on August 8, 2013 after the US government ordered it to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys, in order to allow the government to spy on Edward Snowden's email.
Lavabit's owner and operator, Ladar Levison, announced on January 20, 2017 that Lavabit would start operating again, using the new Dark Internet Mail Environment (DIME), which is an end-to-end email encryption platform designed to be more surveillance-resistant. However, as of May 2017[update], while the DIME transition is being completed, service is only being offered to past customers.
Lavabit was founded by Texas-based programmers who formed Nerdshack LLC, renamed Lavabit LLC the next year, who cited privacy concerns about Gmail, Google's free, widely used email service, and their use of the content of users' email to generate advertisements and marketing data. Lavabit offered significant privacy protection for their users' email, including asymmetric encryption. The strength of the cryptographic methods used was of a level that is presumed impossible for even intelligence agencies to crack. In August 2013, Lavabit had about 410,000 users and offered free and paid accounts with levels of storage ranging from 128 megabytes to 8 gigabytes. In January 2011, Lavabit had launched a shared web hosting service.
Before the Snowden incident, Lavabit had complied with previous search warrants. For example, in June 2013 a search warrant was executed against a Lavabit account for suspected possession of child pornography.
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Wikipedia