So Lavabit is gone. If you hadn't heard, the guy who ran it, Ladar Levison, just shut the whole thing down on Thursday with this weirdly dramatic message on the homepage about not wanting to "become complicit in crimes against the American people," and that he legally couldn't tell anyone why. No warning to the roughly 400,000 users, no export window, nothing. One day it's an email provider you pay $8 a year for, the next day it's a wall of text and your inbox is just gone.
We all know what this is actually about even though nobody involved is allowed to say it out loud. Lavabit was reportedly the service Edward Snowden used for his email, and Levison had apparently been fighting some kind of order for weeks before he pulled the plug rather than comply. A couple days later Silent Circle killed their Silent Mail product too, preemptively, before anyone even asked them to. Two companies deciding the safest move is to not exist anymore. That's a strange sentence to type.
I keep coming back to how much guts that actually takes. Levison built this thing over ten years. It was his business, presumably his main income, and he just torched it rather than quietly hand something over and let everyone keep using the service none the wiser. Most companies in his position would take the order, comply, say nothing, and keep collecting the $8. He didn't. I don't know the guy and I have no idea if his politics line up with mine on anything else, but that's a genuinely hard thing to do and I don't think enough people are giving him credit for it.
Here's my small, dumb complaint though: I tried to get into encrypted email once, back around 2011, and I gave up after about a week because it was miserable. PGP key management is the kind of thing that sounds simple in a blog post and is actually a nightmare in practice — remembering to encrypt, making sure the other person's key is current, the fact that basically nobody you email actually uses it so you're encrypting messages to yourself in an empty room. I went back to plain old Gmail within the month and felt vaguely guilty about it for a while, then stopped feeling guilty about it, which is probably the more honest description of what most people did.
And that's kind of the real story here, not the Lavabit shutdown itself but what it says about the gap between "the technology to protect your email exists" and "any normal person will actually use it." Everyone I know who cares about this stuff on a technical level has a slightly haunted look about them right now. Everyone else just shrugged and kept using whatever they were using. My own mother's response when I mentioned this was "so what, I don't have anything to hide," which is the single most predictable sentence in the English language at this point and it still makes me want to throw something across the room every time I hear it. It's not about having something to hide. Nobody thinks their bathroom needs curtains because they're doing something shameful in there.
I don't have a neat answer for what regular people are supposed to do instead. Moving to some boutique encrypted provider that might also get a secret order and might also disappear overnight isn't exactly a stable long-term plan, as this week just proved rather dramatically. I'm not switching anything today. I'm still on Gmail, still not encrypting anything, still the same hypocrite I was last month. But I did spend a chunk of my Saturday afternoon reading through the whole Lavabit message about four separate times instead of doing the yard work I was supposed to be doing, so it got under my skin more than I expected going in.
One more thing worth mentioning, mostly as a footnote: there's a separate mess brewing over at BlackBerry, which announced it's forming a committee to look at "strategic alternatives," corporate-speak for "we might sell the company or take it private." That one's going to run for months and every tech site on earth is already covering it to death, so I'll leave it there for now. The Lavabit thing feels smaller and somehow bigger at the same time, if that makes any sense at all.