> The court ordered Levison to be fined $5,000 a day beginning 6 August until he handed over electronic copies of the keys. Two days later Levison handed over the keys hours after he shuttered Lavabit.
I remember that. That was around the time they were using the National Security Letter to make things happen that were clearly illegal. Now look at where we are at. They are using Nation Security reasoning for anything.
Re:Veracrypt Project Update
by bornfreddy on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @04:51PM
(#47696092)
That's just stupid. Take 10 people, each enters the data independently, compare their versions and select the most common of each character. With 1 second per character they would finish in an hour, coffee break included. They just didn't want to bother.
Irrespective of whether this particular court order to share the keys was OK in the first place, you shouldn't get to respond to a court order with any kind of malicious compliance even if it isn't "too much" extra work for other parties.
> The contempt of court was caused by Levison providing the keys printed in a tiny (4 point) font, which was deemed "largely illegible" by an FBI motion, which went on to complain that "To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."
(And to be clear, that's all they ever saw of said keys)