In the war over encryption between the NSA and privacy activists, who is winning?
Ladar Levison sits exhausted, slumped on a sofa with his dog Princess on his lap. He is surrounded by boxes after he moved into a new house in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, the previous day.
He describes his new home as a "monastery for programmers". Levison and co-workers plan to live and work there as they create a new email service which will allow people to communicate entirely securely and privately. His goal, he says, is to "spread encryption to the masses".
It is a new email service because Levison himself shut down his old one - called Lavabit - after a visit from the FBI.
It began with a business card in May of last year. They were after the communications of one of his clients. Levison cannot say who it was but everyone knows it was Edward Snowden who had just left the country with a stash of secret documents and was using his Lavabit email to communicate.
A tussle with the FBI led to a court ordering Levison to hand over the keys to his email service. He feared it would leave all his 400,000 users vulnerable so he came up with a plan. The keys consisted of thousands of seemingly random characters. Rather than hand them over in electronic form, he printed them out. In tiny type. And then handed over the piece of paper.
"I met the FBI agents in the lobby and I handed them the envelope and the FBI agent held it up to the light, wiggled it back and forth and was like 'Are these the keys?' And I said yeah. I just printed them out. He was like 'Oh'. So he wrote out a receipt for one sealed white envelope."
Levison knew that it would take time for the FBI to input the keys and that gave him the chance to shut down his entire system. He had named his machines after his ex-girlfriends and describes the process of pulling the plug as a "surreal experience… seeing all of the lights continue to blink out in the ether as all the users tried to continue to access their email even though the systems had been turned off."
At the heart of Ladar Levison's case is a question. Do we want our communications to be entirely private so that absolutely no-one apart from the recipient can know what's being said? Or are we prepared to allow the state access - for instance when it says it is investigating crime or protecting national security? That issue has come to the forefront now because of Edward Snowden. But what's known as the crypto-wars have in fact been going on for 40 years.
