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Comment by MyDogHasFleas | Hacker News Reader

Where's the "I wish you hadn't done that, lavabit, I'm a customer and I feel very screwed over by this action" comments?

Or is this appropriate for any SaaS vendor? You're OK with this? Should all customers, even those who really don't care if the NSA could be watching, be put out because some feel that this cause trumps actually doing business and having customer-vendor relationships?

I could see someone suing an SaaS vendor for an action like this, actually. "You cost me $XX in actual costs and $YYY in lost business. Your TOS says nothing about your shutting down because the government asked you to do something you didn't agree with."

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> I could see someone suing an SaaS vendor for an action like this, actually.

So? A SaaS vendor that shuts down operations in to avoid complying with a mandate of a court is taking a major risk of losing all its assets to legal action by the government. On top of that, the risk of legal action by dissatisfied customer is a pretty small marginal cost.

> "You cost me $XX in actual costs and $YYY in lost business. Your TOS says nothing about your shutting down because the government asked you to do something you didn't agree with."

You'll probably find that, unless you have specific contract terms relating to expected costs of failure to provide service, expectation damages of the type you describe are barred by the foreseeability prong of the test for expectation damages.

>Your TOS says nothing about your shutting down because the government asked you to do something you didn't agree with.

Technically, you can't say that this happened, because they can't confirm that they shut down for this reason. In light of recent events this seems obvious, but in an actual court, you would not be allowed to use this as a sole defense.

> Should all customers, even those who really don't care if the NSA could be watching, be put out because some feel that this cause trumps actually doing business and having customer-vendor relationships?

If they don't care, why pick lavabit then?

From my point of view they did exactly what they were supposed to do.

Yep, you're right. I wasn't thinking about their specific business model and customer set. Thanks for setting me straight.

I wonder what the Lavabit TOS and privacy terms actually said? Usually they say something like "we will not disclose ... Except to comply with legally served requests..." I'm curious whether Lavabit had something different here.

Perhaps this suggests a new business model, a sort of turbo canary, where the service explicitly commits to shut down rather than comply with a secret order which it would otherwise be compelled to obey.

If you're buying a secure email service, the compromise of that security would be a bigger screw-job. Lavabit must have shut down in the interest of its customers, otherwise why would they have shut down?

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