Either Lavabit's founder is lying or this Wired article is wrong[0]. Per the wired article, the government asserts that “The representative of Lavabit indicat

Either Lavabit's founder is lying or this Wired article is wrong[0]. Per the wired article, the government asserts that “The representative of Lavabit indicated that Lavabit had the technical capability to decrypt the information, but that Lavabit did not want to ‘defeat [its] own system,’" Itis only after Lavabit refused to just decrypt Snowden's email, that the FBI demanded everything and the judge makes that assertion. Of course, the Wired article might be wrong. However, I cannot think of a single legitimate technical reason why Lavabit could not break their own encryption for a single use. The encryption and decryption was done server side. This means they can pull the key out of memory. Worst case, they can grab Snowden's password/key when it goes to the server. [0] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/