Lavabit announces return

Lavabit’s website has a counter that counts down to January 20, accompanied by the announcement that the secure mail service will soon be making a comeback. The service would thus return more than three years after its closure.

Details about the return are not on the Lavabit site. However, the domain name is still in the name of Ladar Levison, the administrator who was also behind the original Lavabit service. A comeback would be striking, as the administrator indicated in 2013 that he saw no other option than to stop his e-mail service.

He made that decision after the FBI forced him to install listening devices and hand over the encryption keys to customers. Levison was initially not allowed to say anything about this, but later it turned out that the requirement was made to view e-mail from Edward Snowden. Snowden was one of Lavabit’s 410,000 customers. Levison and Silent Circle worked on a secure email protocol after the shutdown.

The date of the return is also striking: Donald Trump will take office on January 20. Trump himself doesn’t use e-mail, and the president-to-be said, according to the NYT, that people who have something really important to say should deliver it on a written paper via a courier, since “no computer is safe.”