Letter written by Lavabit's owner Ladar Levison on the company's website.

Hours after Lavabit shut down, Silent Cirlce also said that it would close its secure email service. 

In a letter posted on the company’s website, Ladar Levison, owner and operator of Lavabit LLC, states: “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.”

The company, which claims 350,000 customers, apparently rejected a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers, becoming the first company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance.  

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On Friday, Silent Circle also posted a letter on its website, explaining: “We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.”

Snowden is reported to have used Lavabit service to communicate with journalists and share information about the National Security Agency’s spying program. 

“I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate request,” Levison wrote. Although the letter doesn’t mention Snowden’s name, those six months match the period since Snowden leaked secret information about NSA’s spying operations, suggesting the government has been trying to access Lavabit’s servers and had gagged the company from saying so. 

Unlike popular email services such as Google Mail, Lavabit allowed users to securely encrypt messages on its servers, which could then only be accessed with the user's password.

The letter also said that Levison is unable to tell the public of the exact circumstances that led to the decision to shut down, and that the company is preparing a case in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

The justice department said it had no comment to make. Representatives from the NSA, White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately reply to a request for comment, reports the Guardian.

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