On August 8th, Lavabit, newly famous for being the secure e-mail service used by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, went dark. Its owner and operator, Ladar Levison, replaced its home page with a message: “I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.” Levison could write only that he chose to shut down the company rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people,” and he promised to “fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Court-watchers repeatedly checked the Fourth Circuit docket to see whether Levison would follow through. While the Fourth Circuit kept the appeals secret and placed them under seal, observers deduced that Levison’s appeals were the ones numbered 13-4625 and 13-4626. Last week, U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton unsealed a hundred and sixty-two pages of previously secret documents related to two District Court orders issued against Lavabit, so that Levison could have a public record of his appeals. These disclosures fall short of the ideal of open justice, but they do give Levison’s ordeal a public shape.

They also allow Levison to speak more openly now. This past weekend, in Manhattan’s Bryant Park, his demeanor was steady, if clearly burdened; he is, after all, a man who was forced to destroy the business he had spent most of the past decade building, and who is locked in a legal and philosophical battle against the United States government.

Levison wore a white, starched collared shirt with thin gold cufflinks; the afternoon was warm, and sweat, mixed with the gel that fixed his hair in a slightly spiked coiffure, dotted his forehead. He spoke sternly but calmly—his tenor lacked the quiet frenzy of, say, Thomas Drake, the N.S.A. whistleblower, even though most of what he had to say was bad news, if you value electronic privacy or security. He doesn’t use e-mail on his Android smartphone, for instance, because neither the software nor the hardware of any commercial phone can be trusted; carriers and phone makers can push malware onto the device, he said. Yet his views are far from radical. While he opposes the bulk collection of domestic communications, he has no such strong feelings about the N.S.A.’s foreign-surveillance efforts. He is, if anything, disappointed that the U.S. government would spy on its own citizens on such a grand scale, and with such impunity, even though Levison’s decision to build a privacy-oriented e-mail service in the first place, in 2004, was partly in response to the Patriot Act. Part of Lavabit’s mission, before it shut down, was that it would “never sacrifice privacy for profits.” One of its most notable features was that, for paying users, it encrypted e-mail messages and other files stored on its server so that they could not be read by third parties without a user’s password.

As the Times reported last week, the unsealed documents reveal that the first chapter of Levison’s “tangle with law enforcement” began in May—well before the first Snowden leak of the N.S.A.’s massive database of call logs broke in June—when an F.B.I. agent left his business card on Levison’s doorstep. On June 10th, the government secured an order from the Eastern District of Virginia. The order, issued under the Stored Communications Act, required Lavabit to turn over to the F.B.I. retrospective information about one account, widely presumed to be that of Snowden. (The name of the target remains redacted, and Levison could not divulge it.) The order directed Lavabit to surrender names and addresses, Internet Protocol and Media Access Control addresses, the volume of each and every data transfer, the duration of every “session,” and the “source and destination” of all communications associated with the account. It also forbade Levison and Lavabit from discussing the matter with anyone.

Levison now says that while that particular investigation “escalated,” it was not the only one to land at his doorstep in recent years. He believes that even if he hadn’t hosted the e-mail account of the target, Lavabit would eventually have found itself in the position that it’s in now because it “constitutes a gap” in the government’s intelligence. The broader implication—as shown by the N.S.A.’s efforts to attack the anonymous Tor network—is that intelligence agencies will try to crack any service designed for privacy and used at scale.

On June 28th, the Eastern District Court of Virginia issued another order, “authorizing the installation and use of a pen register and the use of a trap and trace device” on all electronic communications being sent from or to the account. The term “pen register” is a relic of Morse’s telegraph; it refers to the mechanical pen that recorded the electrical pulses that routed a telegraph. Today, the term is used to refer to any device or process that records outgoing routing information, such as phone numbers dialed or e-mail addresses typed. A “trap and trace device” does the inverse, and records incoming phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other connections. A court may issue this kind of order if the information likely to be captured is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” This order also forbade Lavabit from discussing the matter.

The unsealed documents describe a meeting on June 28th between the F.B.I. and Levison at Levison’s home in Dallas. There, according to the documents, Levison told the F.B.I. that he would not comply with the pen-register order and wanted to speak to an attorney. As the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Neil MacBride, described it, “It was unclear whether Mr. Levison would not comply with the order because it was technically not feasible or difficult, or because it was not consistent with his business practice in providing secure, encrypted e-mail service for his customers.” The meeting must have gone poorly for the F.B.I. because McBride filed a motion to compel Lavabit to comply with the pen-register and trap-and-trace order that very same day.

Magistrate Judge Theresa Carroll Buchanan granted the motion, inserting in her own handwriting that Lavabit was subject to “the possibility of criminal contempt of Court” if it failed to comply. When Levison didn’t comply, the government issued a summons, “United States of America v. Ladar Levison,” ordering him to explain himself on July 16th. The newly unsealed documents reveal tense talks between Levison and the F.B.I. in July. Levison wanted additional assurances that any device installed in the Lavabit system would capture only narrowly targeted data, and no more. He refused to provide real-time access to Lavabit data; he refused to go to court unless the government paid for his travel; and he refused to work with the F.B.I.’s technology unless the government paid him for “developmental time and equipment.” He instead offered to write an intercept code for the account’s metadata—for thirty-five hundred dollars. He asked Judge Hilton whether there could be “some sort of external audit” to make sure that the government did not take additional data. (The government plan did not include any oversight to which Levison would have access, he said.)