Compelled disclosure
Compelled disclosure is an order from a court or a government that requires a service provider to hand over data about its users. The provider can obey the order, close the service, or show that it holds nothing useful. Three well-documented cases, ProtonMail in 2021, Lavabit in 2013 and Signal from 2016 onwards, show each of these outcomes.
The basics
What a provider can hand over depends on what it holds. A company that keeps account details, logs or encryption keys can be ordered to give them up. A company that never collects them has nothing to produce.
Signal states the principle in its own published responses to legal requests. It says it "cannot turn over information that we never had access to in the first place".
Orders of this kind can also come with secrecy. When Lavabit closed in 2013, its founder said he was not legally allowed to share the events that led to his decision.
The three cases below differ in what each provider held when the order arrived, and in what it then did.
How it applies to Logos
The Logos activist course Building a Parallel Society (2026) uses these three cases to argue that "Policy cannot protect us, only architecture can". It describes the options as "Obey", "Refuse and die" and "Have nothing to give". The course argues that "Only the third option survives" and that "A resistant parallel society is built so it cannot be coerced."
The course pairs this with a second risk, being switched off, which this wiki covers under Infrastructure shutdowns. It presents the Logos stack as its answer to both. In its words, the stack "runs as networks of independent machines all over the world, so there is no company to order and no switch to pull." The stack is made up of Logos Blockchain, Logos Storage and Logos Messaging, which people run on their own machines through Basecamp.
Examples
Obey: ProtonMail, 2021
In September 2021 Proton, the Swiss company behind the ProtonMail email service, published a response to the case of a climate activist who had been arrested by French police. Proton said it had "received a legally binding order from Swiss authorities which we are obligated to comply with." It added that "There was no possibility to appeal this particular request."
Engadget reported that French authorities sent the request via Europol and that ProtonMail "gave up a French climate activist's IP address to Swiss police." The Register, citing a French activist blog, reported that the group targeted was called Youth for Climate. It also noted that ProtonMail's homepage had said in January 2021 that by default it did not keep IP logs that could be linked to an anonymous account. That wording was later changed.
Proton's response said the use of its onion site on the Tor network was "highly recommended for users with heightened privacy needs".
Close the service: Lavabit, 2013
Lavabit was an encrypted email service run by Ladar Levison. In 2013 the US government obtained a "pen/trap" order to collect information in real time about "the specific investigatory target's Lavabit email account." To do this it demanded the service's encryption keys. An order of 1 August 2013 told Lavabit and Levison to hand over the keys by 2 August.
The keys protected the whole service. The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit later wrote that "exposing one key-pair could affect all of Lavabit's estimated 400,000-plus email users." Levison first handed over the keys as an 11-page printout "containing largely illegible characters in 4-point type." The district court found Lavabit and Levison in contempt. After he provided the keys, he "also shut Lavabit down entirely."
On 8 August 2013 Levison posted a statement saying he had 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 Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that the service had apparently been used by Edward Snowden. In April 2014 the Fourth Circuit upheld the contempt finding.
Have nothing to give: Signal, 2016 onwards
Signal publishes the legal requests it has been forced to answer on a page called Government Communication. Its list runs from a 2016 grand jury subpoena in the Eastern District of Virginia to a subpoena from the District of Columbia in November 2026.
In the 2016 case Signal said the only information it could produce "is the date and time a user registered with Signal and the last date of a user's connectivity to the Signal service." In a 2021 case from the Central District of California it again gave only "Unix timestamps for when each account was created and the date that each account last connected to the Signal service." Signal says it has no access to users' messages, chat lists, groups, contacts, profile names or avatars.
See also
Takes on this idea
None yet. See Takes.
Sources
- Important clarifications regarding arrest of climate activist, Proton, 6 September 2021
- ProtonMail under fire after giving authorities an activist's IP address, Engadget, 6 September 2021
- ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested, The Register, 7 September 2021
- In re: Under Seal (United States v. Lavabit), No. 13-4625, US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, 16 April 2014
- Lavabit Encrypted Email Service Shuts Down, Can't Say Why, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 8 August 2013
- Government Communication, Signal, accessed 4 November 2026
- Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California, Signal, 2021
- Building a Parallel Society, Logos activist course, 2026