Most Curious: Email Provider that Snowden Relied-upon Unexpectedly Shut Down

As if it weren’t bad enough that the US government was exposed for mass spying, involving not only foreigners but even its own people, we can now see that situations are only bound to get worse if nothing changes soon.

A couple of weeks ago, it was revealed that NSA leaker Edward Snowden relied-upon email provider Lavabit for his main communication with the press and likely others. The reason he chose Lavabit was because it took security much more seriously than other providers, implementing extremely effective encryption that governments clearly hate. It’s quite intriguing, then, that Lavabit this week ceased operations, out-of-nowhere.

A note on the front page (seen above) of the site notifies us of the closure, but for legal reasons, founder Ladar Levison can’t get give us anything useful in terms of the whys, hows and who. He states: “I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.“

The most shocking line of the small note is the last couple of lines: “This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.“

That right there highlights who’s behind the closure, though it wouldn’t have been difficult to figure out otherwise. It seems that the US government on a whim can shut down a service just because someone it’s seeking uses it, all while exercising its ability to remove all transparency from the people and businesses affected.

I don’t know about you guys, but this freaks me out. This is not the road we want to go down.