We still don't know everything that transpired here, but here's my interpretation of the article: - The government is granted the right to snoop on Snowden's e

We still don't know everything that transpired here, but here's my interpretation of the article: - The government is granted the right to snoop on Snowden's e-mail from a court. The court implores Lavabit to provide the technical expertise necessary to make this successful. - Lavabit replies that all traffic is encrypted, and that it would be a expensive to change that. Lavabit offers to make those changes so long as the government covers the costs of the change (in this case, one week of developer time). - The government balks at the prospect of paying for the change and tries to snoop themselves. They realize that the encrypted data they can snoop on themselves is worthless, and demand the ability to decrypt it themselves. All of this seems to hinge on Lavabit's demand that it be paid to make the changes necessary to make the pen register effective. Presuming the government was willing to pay him (or he was willing to work for free), there would be a http://fbi.lavabit.com/snowden http://fbi.lavabit.com/snowden that mirrored all of Snowden's metadata and it would interoperate with the government's pen register. There would be no need to compromise everyone else's SSL key. I'm not familiar with legal procedure, but how does that corrupt the chain of custody in a way that other solutions would not?