I've been sitting on this post for about a week now because I wanted to see how it would shake out, and I don't think it's finished shaking yet. Short version: Lavabit, the encrypted email service that (allegedly, though everybody knows) Edward Snowden used, shut itself down on August 8th rather than comply with whatever the government was asking for. And then, the very next day, Silent Circle killed its own Silent Mail product too, before anyone even asked them to.
That second part is the bit that's been rattling around my head.
Ladar Levison, the guy who ran Lavabit basically by himself for about ten years, posted this incredibly cagey message on the site. He said he'd been "forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." He also said he legally isn't allowed to talk about what actually happened, which, if you think about that for more than a few seconds, is a genuinely insane sentence for an American citizen to have to write about his own company. He's not being cagey for dramatic effect. He can't tell us. There's a gag order.
Silent Circle didn't wait to find out what happens when you fight one of those orders. Mike Janke and the team just pulled the plug on Silent Mail preemptively, saying something to the effect of "we see the writing on the wall." They kept their voice and text products running because those don't store the same kind of data in the same vulnerable way, but email, as they put it, is basically unfixable if someone with a subpoena wants in badly enough.
I don't think I'm being dramatic when I say that's a wild thing to watch happen to consumer software. Companies don't usually shut down profitable products out of principle. Usually it's the opposite — they keep limping along a dying product for years because someone somewhere doesn't want to admit it's over (looking at you, every social network with a "for kids" spinoff nobody asked for). Here you had two companies looking at legal pressure and just... closing the doors themselves instead of quietly handing over keys and pretending nothing happened.
I had a Lavabit account. Not a serious one, just something I signed up for a couple years back when I went through my "I should really do something about my email security" phase, the one everybody who reads Hacker News goes through eventually and then mostly abandons because it's annoying. I never migrated my actual mail there because setting it up properly with GPG felt like more friction than I had patience for on a random Tuesday night. So I lost basically nothing when it went dark. But I keep thinking about the ~400,000 people who apparently did use it seriously, journalists and lawyers and who knows who else, who woke up one morning and just had no access to their inbox. No warning, no export tool, nothing. Levison basically said as much himself — this wasn't a graceful sunset, it was closer to pulling a fire alarm.
What gets me is how it exposes the actual tradeoff nobody likes to say out loud: convenience and security are not the same axis, and most of us have quietly picked convenience every single time without really deciding to. I use Gmail for everything. I know Google reads it, in the sense that machines parse it for ads and spam filtering and whatever else. I've made my peace with that bargain a long time ago, mostly because switching is a pain and everyone I email is on Gmail too. Network effects win over principle nine times out of ten, and I say that as someone who is annoyed at myself for it.
Anyway. Nobody knows exactly what the government wanted from Lavabit, and depending on who eventually gets to talk about it (if anyone ever does), we might find out this was about one specific inbox or something way broader. Levison's already said he's considering an appeal, which given the gag order situation sounds like it'll be a strange, half-visible legal fight if it happens at all.
I don't have a tidy conclusion here, mostly because there isn't one yet. Just: two small companies decided closing was better than complying, quietly, this week, and I think that's worth more attention than it's getting buried under everything else going on right now.