[ambulancechaser]

Someone already replied, but this is exactly opposite what happened as stated. The US government wanted access to only one particular user. The infrastructure did not allow this, and the guy behind Lavabit objected because a single key regulated everything, including server management. He offered to hand over the things that USG requested, which was obviously denied as they could not be sure he was handing over everything. The US government had a valid warrant and was willing to pay for re-keying after they were done. This to me seemed straightforward. He did not have the system setup so that the data was unavailable to him, so why could the government not subpoena the data that existed and was available?