Lavabit

Ladar Levison, founder of the now-shuttered secure Lavabit email service, is finally free to talk about the federal government's electronic pursuit of his most famous customer, leaker Edward Snowden, after a court unsealed documents in the case. Levinson told The New York Times that he closed down his business rather than cooperate because law enforcement didn't just want access to Snowden's communications but such broad access that they could have gotten to all of his patrons. According to The Times, "they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much 'You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,'" Levison said.