> "They had a (presumably lawfully obtained) warrant against a specific user; it's not they who designed lavabit such that it was impossible to execute this without obtaining access to every other user."
This is what the battle over the clipper chip was about, and the government lost that one. Communications providers, absent any prior court orders, have no legal obligation to make their systems mass backdoor-compliant. It is the government, nominally, which is burdened here by the obligation to conduct their investigation without trampling the rights of 400,000 other people.
> "Even if he had turned over the SSL keys, the US still has a fairly strong "fruit of the poison tree" doctrine: any information the government happened to obtain on other users would be invalid for prosecution because it wouldn't be covered by their search warrant."
Which is why the government uses "parallel construction" to get around this restriction. And because the original source of the evidence remains classified, nobody can say for sure why the defendent was randomly stopped on the highway.
This is what the battle over the clipper chip was about, and the government lost that one. Communications providers, absent any prior court orders, have no legal obligation to make their systems mass backdoor-compliant. It is the government, nominally, which is burdened here by the obligation to conduct their investigation without trampling the rights of 400,000 other people.
> "Even if he had turned over the SSL keys, the US still has a fairly strong "fruit of the poison tree" doctrine: any information the government happened to obtain on other users would be invalid for prosecution because it wouldn't be covered by their search warrant."
Which is why the government uses "parallel construction" to get around this restriction. And because the original source of the evidence remains classified, nobody can say for sure why the defendent was randomly stopped on the highway.