I have never found myself in the situation that Ladar Levison describes but I wonder (and fear) whether I would have the courage to shut down my business on a matter of principle like that.
You might believe the government should never be able to access private communications at all, but that would be a quite extreme position. In this case they had a (presumably legitimate) warrant for access to a specific user's emails (and while it shouldn't affect the principles at issue, it focuses the mind to remember that this was a child porn case IIRC).
Do you have a link? If you're referring to Lavabit's shutdown, according to this source [1], they were looking for Snowden. I've never heard Snowden associated with child porn.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed...
Children are absolutely innocent, and they always deserve protection. Using child exploitation as a means to snoop isn't protecting; it's just a bullshit excuse at mass surveillance. There is, however, a balance to privacy.
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed...
But federal authorities recently screwed up and revealed the secret themselves when they published a cache of case documents but failed to redact one identifying piece of information about the target: his email address, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. With that, the very authorities holding the threat of jail time over Levison’s head if he said anything have confirmed what everyone had long ago presumed: that the target account was Snowden’s.