Lavabit founder: Feds ORDERED email providers to stay open
Found on The Register on Tuesday, 19 November 2013
Lavabit's founder has claimed other secure webmail providers who threatened to shut themselves down in the wake of the NSA spying revelations had received court orders forcing them to stay up.
DoJ attorneys also dismissed Lavabit's argument that disclosing its encryption keys was incompatible with offering a secure email service. Marketing a business as a "secure" service to consumers provides no legal obstacle to court orders, US government lawyers state in the conclusion to their argument.
Maybe that's the reason why email clients don't offer a convenient and simple way for end to end encryption. Despite all the progress in the recent years, using PGP still requires the installation of 3rd party software and handling keys, something the majority of users don't want to do.