Lavabit won a victory in court that allowed them to reveal the FBI's secret demand: turn over your SSL root certificate or go to jail. Quoting Wired:
The complete document set can be found here.
So basically, in order to go after one person - and by all indications, that person is Edward Snowden - the FBI demanded the metadata for all Lavabit users, and then eventually demanded the keys to all Lavabit traffic, encrypted or not. In response, Lavabit shut their doors and risked criminal prosecution. I give them ten out of ten for integrity.
It's important not to read too much into this case with respect to the NSA's wiretapping program, by the way. The FBI and NSA are operating by different sets of rules with respect to how they are allowed to gather information, and the NSA in particular has their own secret court to approve their activities. Note, also, that the FBI is using a vacuum cleaner approach to go after one suspect, whereas the NSA is using a vacuum cleaner approach to profile literally everyone.
“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,’” the government complained.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan immediately ordered Lavabit to comply, threatening Levison with criminal contempt — which could have potentially put him in jail.
By July 9, Lavabit still hadn’t defeated its security for the government, and prosecutors asked for a summons to be served for Lavabit, and founder Ladar Levison, to be held in contempt “for its disobedience and resistance to these lawful orders.”
A week later, prosecutors upped the ante and obtained the search warrant demanding “all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from the Lavabit e-mail account [redacted] including encryption keys and SSL keys.”
With the SSL keys, and a wiretap, the FBI could have decrypted all web sessions between Lavabit users and the site, though the documents indicate the bureau still trying only to capture metadata on one user.
The complete document set can be found here.
So basically, in order to go after one person - and by all indications, that person is Edward Snowden - the FBI demanded the metadata for all Lavabit users, and then eventually demanded the keys to all Lavabit traffic, encrypted or not. In response, Lavabit shut their doors and risked criminal prosecution. I give them ten out of ten for integrity.
It's important not to read too much into this case with respect to the NSA's wiretapping program, by the way. The FBI and NSA are operating by different sets of rules with respect to how they are allowed to gather information, and the NSA in particular has their own secret court to approve their activities. Note, also, that the FBI is using a vacuum cleaner approach to go after one suspect, whereas the NSA is using a vacuum cleaner approach to profile literally everyone.