Mumbai Press Center

November 3, 2026 | [FEATURE] The TrueCrypt Enigma: A Chronicle of Cryptography, Crime, and Erasure | Part III

Part III: The Gathering Storm (2013)

For nearly a decade, TrueCrypt had earned the trust of security professionals and privacy advocates without revealing who maintained it.

Then, in 2013, the environment around it changed.

The Snowden disclosures exposed the scale of state-backed mass-surveillance.

The confrontation over Lavabit demonstrated the pressure that could be brought against a privacy service.

Together, these events transformed questions about encryption from specialist concerns into matters of international significance.

The Snowden Revelation: TrueCrypt on the NSA's "Most Wanted" List

In June 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began disclosing classified documents revealing the extent of global mass-surveillance.

TrueCrypt was closely associated with the security practices surrounding those disclosures.

Snowden's use of it to protect sensitive material gave the software a significance beyond its existing reputation: it was a tool trusted by someone with everything at stake.

The disclosures also offered a glimpse of how intelligence agencies viewed such protections.

A January 2012 document, published by Der Spiegel in December 2014, described the difficulties that privacy tools posed to surveillance operations.

TrueCrypt appeared alongside Tor and Tails in reporting about technologies capable of causing serious losses of intelligence visibility.

The language was striking: "a majority or near-total loss or lack of insight into the highest-priority targets' communications".

The public learned of that document after TrueCrypt's shutdown, but it illuminated the environment in which the project had been operating.

The disclosures did not establish that the NSA had broken TrueCrypt.

They did establish an intelligence interest in overcoming the protections offered by software of this kind.

For users, that was a reason to value it.

For its developers, it could also have been a reason to worry.

The Lavabit Precedent: A Shot Across the Bow

If the Snowden documents revealed the appetite for access, Lavabit demonstrated how that access could be pursued.

Lavabit was a secure email service used by Snowden.

In the summer of 2013, the FBI demanded that its owner, Ladar Levison, surrender the service's private SSL encryption keys.

The demand reached beyond one account.

Possession of the keys threatened the confidentiality of communications across a service with approximately 400,000 users.

Levison resisted.

He initially supplied the keys as an eleven-page printout in tiny type.

Under the threat of daily fines of $5,000, he chose to close the service rather than continue operating on the government's terms.

On August 8, 2013, Lavabit shut down.

Levison said he would not "become complicit in crimes against the American people".

For privacy-focused developers, the implications were difficult to miss.

Technical security did not remove the possibility of secret court orders, financial penalties, or demands for cooperation.

Lavabit was a service, not a downloadable encryption program, and the practical circumstances differed.

But the broader warning was clear: a system could be threatened through its operator without its encryption first being defeated.

For TrueCrypt's anonymous developers, it was an unsettling precedent.

The Audit: A Community's Bid for Certainty

The same events intensified scrutiny of TrueCrypt itself.

Its anonymity had long been accepted as part of the project's character.

After Snowden, users wanted stronger grounds for trust than reputation and years of apparent reliability.

In October 2013, Matthew Green and Kenneth White launched the Open Crypto Audit Project, or OCAP, to fund an independent professional assessment.

The campaign raised more than $60,000.

OCAP engaged iSEC Partners, later part of NCC Group, for the first phase.

Its scope focused on critical Windows components, including the bootloader and kernel driver.

The central questions were straightforward: did the software contain intentional backdoors, and did its implementation contain serious weaknesses?

For once, part of the TrueCrypt story appeared likely to receive an answer based on direct examination rather than inference.

Asia/Pacific Press Office - Mumbai Press Center