A Question About Lavabit

[Duxwing]

Dear Forum,

Why was the founder of Lavabit, an encrypted email service company against which the United States government had obtained a search warrant in pursuit of the whistleblower Edward Snowden, not found in contempt of court and ordered to restore Lavabit after he defiantly shut it down?  Although I deplore the whole affair of mass surveillance, I also cannot ignore that the government appeared to have legal means to pursue him personally for his services or, should that pursuit have failed, publicly punish him for opposing its agenda.  Therefore, I seek the knowledge of better-read posters who could enlighten me about this subject.

Points to Consider

1) The government's case against the founder was under seal, and the founder himself was under a gag-order and without adequate counsel, leaving the prosecutor able to make threats whose credibility or even legality the defendant obviously could not ascertain.  Yet, the government did not exploit this opportunity to easily terrorize the hapless founder into submission.

2) The government must have known that it would later require the cooperation of other people, whom it must also have known could be moved by the example of the Lavabit founder.  Yet, the government did not infer from this knowledge that his example would move them to cooperate only if he surrendered rather than, as he did, martyr himself and thereby inspire  martyrdom.

3) The government had illegal but clandestine means to extract what it wanted from the Lavabit founder.  Yet, it did not avail itself of them and instead availed itself of the court, where the founder predictably won a political and moral victory if not a legal one.

With these points being considered, the government's decision to take the Lavabit founder to a federal court rather than a black site seems, although relieving, bizarre.  So, why did the government do what it did?

-Duxwing

 

Edited March 18, 2016 by Duxwing

[Tex]

Sorry, but this thread violates rule 2.2b, which prohibits discussions of political nature. Locked.