It’s clear that Lavabit is going to be collateral damage in the Snowden case, regardless of the fact whether the email system was as secure as advertised or not.
US wants $10,000 from Lavabit owner for dodging order for Snowden’s email
Levison was held in contempt of court and fined $5,000 for every day he did not turn over the keys after the FBI installed a monitoring device on his servers. Without the keys in a “usable electronic format,” the FBI could not read any of the data it was collecting.
Levison waited two days, racking up $10,000 in sanctions, then turned over the keys and immediately shut down his company. He’s appealing the fine now, arguing that requesting a master set of encryption keys was excessive if the FBI only wanted to monitor one user.