Snowden email shut over ‘crimes against US people’

The encrypted email provider Lavabit was shut down abruptly on Thursday, in the midst of a legal battle between US authorities and its owner.

In a letter (shown above), owner Ladar Levison wrote: “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.”

Mr Levison said he has decided to “suspend operations” but was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision.

That matches the period since Mr Snowden went public as the source of media reports detailing secret electronic spying operations by the US National Security Agency.

‘Important lesson’

“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,” Mr Levison wrote.

The US Department of Justice has no immediate comment.

Later on Thursday, an executive with a better-known provider of secure email said his company had also shut down that service.

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away. Ladar Levison, Lavabit owner

Jon Callas, co-founder of Silent Circle Inc, said on Twitter and in a blog post that Silent Circle had ended Silent Mail.

“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now,” Mr Callas wrote on a blog addressed to customers.

Silent Circle, co-founded by the PGP cryptography inventor Phil Zimmermann, will continue to offer secure texting and secure phone calls, but email is harder to keep truly private, Me Callas wrote. He and company representatives did not immediately respond to interview requests.

‘Important relationship’

Meanwhile US and Russian officials will seek to maintain a working relationship when they meet in Washington on Friday, even though the political mood between the countries has hit one of its lowest points since the end of the cold war.

President Barack Obama’s cancellation this week of a summit in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin finally put to rest any notion that a much-vaunted “reset” of ties, sought by the United States in recent years, is alive.

The president’s move came after Mr Putin gave asylum to the former US spy agency contractor, whose public flight after revealing US surveillance programmes was a major embarrassment for Washington.

Influential Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have sought a tougher response and have called on Nato to give membership to Georgia – with which Russia fought a brief war in 2008 – as part of an aggressive new policy against Moscow that would include weaning Europe off Russian energy supplies.

We have a lot of fish to fry, if you will, with the Russians. Jay Carney, White House spokesman

Senior US officials, though, have stressed the need to keep up cooperation with Moscow.

“Let’s be clear. It is still an important relationship,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Thursday.

“We have a lot of fish to fry, if you will, with the Russians. We have a lot of issues to engage with the Russians over.”

US officials expect no breakthroughs when Secretary of State John Kerry and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel meet their Russian counterparts Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu on Friday, but they say the very decision to go ahead with the talks despite the current frictions is significant in itself.

Moscow and Washington disagree over a long list of issues, from Syria’s civil war to human rights and Russia’s ban on homosexual “propaganda”, but there are some areas critical to global security where they have been able to work together.