I remember standing in front of the Dallas branch of the FBI
thinking when I turned over the key,
they might want to arrest me.
Because I had already shut down the system.
They felt they had the right to demand the private key for my business
so they could decrypt everyone's communications
and isolate those belonging to their target.
His name is Edward Snowden, the leaker of classified NSA documents,
that spell out a secret surveillance program .
You don't fully understand the importance of privacy
until you've lost it.
Lavabit is an encrypted communications company
that I started specifically in reaction to the
announcement by Google that they
were launching their Gmail service.
I believe privacy is an inalienable right.
When you're being watched, your behavior changes.
You start doing things differently.
You start saying things differently.
Privacy is critical to the functioning of a free and fair democracy.
I was concerned that Google was going to be scanning people's messages
and using that information to profile them.
So, I thought, heck, why don't I create
a type of email service that I would use myself?
A type of service that a geek would love.
And that's kind of how it all started.
When you look at the geek ethos,
we value things like privacy and security and trust.
After I launched the service,
headlines started coming out
regarding national security letters
that allowed the FBI to collection information
from service providers without
being adjudicated or reviewed by a judge.
And I was very concerned with that particular mechanism
because I felt it was unconstitutional.
As a service provider, I was very concerned
that I would receive one of these letters someday.
And I'd be put in this difficult position
of having to choose between
defending the Constitution or going to jail.
And, of course, knowing myself,
I knew I would pick jail every time.
I had a knock on my door by a couple of FBI agents.
There was a user of my system that
they were particularly keen on surveilling.
The U.S. government wanted to access Edward Snowden's email.
The man who leaked National Security Agency's secrets, he had a Lavabit account.
Now the site's owner, Ladar Levison,
vowed to continue fighting rather than comply with the U.S. government.
I wasn't comfortable with that request.
I decided to shut down service and turn over the key.
I mean, I was doing everything I had worked
so hard to prevent from happening.
And... I just couldn't believe that...
you know, it took ten years to build that business into a success.
And I destroyed it... in one night.
But, I mean, think about the alternative.
The alternative was to become complicit in
crimes against the American people.
To me that was the worse of the two choices.
After I suspend my email service,
I find myself with a lot of free time on my hands.
And, it just sort of hit me.
We know how to solve this problem.
Why don't we go ahead and do it?
The system I designed for Lavabit
had the deficiency of not protecting the message
before it arrived and not protecting it after it left the server.
I'm restarting the Lavabit email service with the same
type of encryption that I was doing on my servers before,
but could now be done on the user's device itself.
It makes mass surveillance obsolete
because it would be impossible to intercept
or steal everybody's key from every device.
The simple fact is, that I took on the Lavabit project
because I realized that I was one of only
a handful of people on the planet who had the necessary skills.
I felt like I had an obligation to use that knowledge
to solve, what I felt, was an incredibly important problem.
We now have 3.5 billion people with email addresses.
I think we're still going to have a
fundamental problem with security on the internet,
unless we add encryption to email.
There's a very good chance there is some piece of information out there that
that you don't want someone to know.
And, if an authority ever came into power that possessed that information,
stripped you of control over it,
they could bend you to their will merely by threatening
to expose that piece of information.
And if those are the people at the wheel,
well, let me ask you this,
when was the last time you didn't trust yourself?