I'm guessing this is what tripped up Lavabit. Mr. Levison probably didn't have the back doors and balked at being complicit once he came onto the NSA's radar.

I'm guessing this is what tripped up Lavabit. Mr. Levison probably didn't have the back doors and balked at being complicit once he came onto the NSA's radar. From the article: "Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read." Also: “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” - Snowden I would assume that because Snowden used Lavabit & they shut down that the NSA took issue with how secure Lavabit actually was.