When Edward Snowden publicly disclosed that tech giants such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook were aiding the government to spy on people in a project dubbed PRISM, some people were quick to look for alternative services that promise end-to-end privacy protection.

So when Snowden invited the press to a tell-all press conference in Moscow using the email account “edsnowden@lavabit.com,” the service was quick to garner the attention of the public.  If Snowden uses the service, it must offer security perks, right?  Unfortunately, the spotlight on Lavabit also caught the attention of the government.  And now Lavabit has gone offline for reasons one can only assume that the government is involved in.

The founder of Lavabit shared his perspective:

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests,” wrote Ladar Levison, Owner and Operator of Lavabit LLC, in a letter which is posted on the site.

Patriotic or Idiotic?

SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto stated that what happened to Lavabit is quite disturbing, as the public has been left in the dark guessing whether the government has ceased its servers because Levison refused to aid the government spy on people and how long the investigation has been going on, and the extent of the investigation since the gag order prevents Levison from speaking out.

Casaretto speculates that the government wants to access Snowden’s email activities, probably hoping to get information as to who he has been communicating with, or whether there are any encryption keys in the emails that could prove very useful for the government to crack as to how much Snowden really knows and what else he is planning to release to the public.

• Can secure email co-exist with the government?

And Lavabit isn’t the only one.  After Lavabit’s shutdown, another secure email service provider, Silent Circle shut down its operations, though its other private services are still operational.

“Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time has past,” said Silent Circle’s Chief Technology Officer, Jon Callas. “We introduced Silent Mail in response to customer demand, stating upfront that – even with encrypted contents – e-mail as we know it today is fundamentally broken from a privacy perspective. With further thought – and before we were served with any demands compounding this issue – we decided it is in our users’ best interests to focus purely on peer-to-peer encrypted phone, text and videoconferencing services because the less information we have on how subscribers use our services, the better it is for everyone.”

“This is an unfortunate example of the chilling effect the current surveillance environment is having on innovative communications companies,” Callas said. “While the majority of our government, commercial and consumer subscribers primarily use the unaffected apps that run on our peer-to-peer encrypted architecture – like Silent Phone and Silent Text – we apologize for any inconvenience this decision caused. We want all customers to always know that their privacy is what is most important to us.”

Wake up call, or call of duty?

With what is happening to secure email services, is Snowden to be blamed for this, or is this a wake up call for everyone to see how the government is overreaching, stopping at nothing to get what they want?

“This is no joke.  It is a real critical issue because in any state there’s a balance between your individual freedom and security.  What’s happening here is, the state now is looking at this pretext of terrorism, brought this into the picture, and has increased their power to such a degree that it has compromised these rights and freedoms that individual citizens have and on this scale it’s very disturbing,” Casaretto stated during a recent appearance on our Live NewsDesk Show.  See the full segment below: