A court order forcing former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's email provider to turn over its master encryption key undermines a critical security feature used by major Internet services, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Thursday.
The EFF, a digital rights watchdog, filed a brief on Thursday in support of the email provider, Lavabit, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Lavabit founder Ladar Levison was found in contempt of court for resisting an order to turn over his company's private SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) key, used to encrypt communications for 400,000 users. He is appealing.
The U.S. government is believed to have sought access to the account of Snowden, who gave out a Lavabit email address after arriving in Russia, but he has not been named in the court documents.
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