If you’re one of the 10,000 or so users who were paying to store encrypted email on the Lavabit servers, you’ll be happy to learn that Ladar Levison is rebooting for a brief period so that you can download stuff. (If you don’t know what’s going on here, you can read my profile of Ladar here.) A press release posted last night reads, in part:
When asked about how his users felt about the loss of personal data, Mr. Levison said, “I’m in the same boat as them. I used my Lavabit email account for 10 years. It was my only email account.”
After users change their passwords, beginning Friday, they will have 72 hours to access their data. Ladar has set up a site for this purpose at https://liberty.lavabit.com. Presumably Edward Snowden and the FBI will both be interested in this development. The former is a Lavabit user, and the latter, presumably, still has a tap on Ladar’s ISP. With Lavabit having secured a new SSL key, though, that tap will be useless during this short reboot.
