Holy shit, I've read some ignorant "internet expert" posts about Lavabit but this one is, by a wide margin, the dumbest one yet.<p>If the moron who wrote this article had bothered to spend 2 seconds to scan over the whitepaper (and other security details that have been published since) he would realize that the email files were stored in encrypted form in the Lavabit database, and decrypting those records would require the password for the relevant account. Lavabit DID provide the FBI with a dump of the records they requested, but without Snowdens personal password the records were useless. To retrieve his password they would need to snarf it of the wire as he logged in, which would require specific code written by the server administrator or access to the SSL keys and a listening device installed between the router and server. Ladar offered to do the former, the FBI refused to pay him for his work and demanded his SSL keys instead.<p>I don't know what this guy is talking about SMTP archiving, that has nothing to do with any of this.