In mid-July, Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office, wrote on her Facebook wall that she had received an e-mail from edsnowden@lavabit.com. It requested that she attend a press conference at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport to discuss the N.S.A. leaker’s “situation.” This was the wider public’s introduction to Lavabit, an e-mail service prized for its security. Lavabit promised, for instance, that messages stored on the service using asymmetric encryption, which encrypts incoming e-mails before they’re saved on Lavabit’s servers, could not even be read by Lavabit itself.

Yesterday, Lavabit went dark. In a cryptic statement posted on the Web site, the service’s owner and operator, Ladar Levison, wrote, “I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.” Those experiences led him to shut down the service rather than, as he put it, “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” Lavabit users reacted with consumer vitriol on the company’s Facebook page (“What about our emails?”), but the tide quickly turned toward government critique. By the end of the night, a similar service, Silent Circle, also shut down its encrypted e-mail product, calling the Lavabit affair the “writing [on] the wall.”

Which secret surveillance scheme is involved in the Lavabit case? The company may have received a national-security letter, which is a demand issued by a federal agency (typically the F.B.I.) that the recipient turn over data about other individuals. These letters often forbid recipients from discussing it with anyone. Another possibility is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may have issued a warrant ordering Lavabit to participate in ongoing e-mail surveillance. We can’t be completely sure: as Judge Reggie Walton, the presiding judge of the FISA court, explained to Senator Patrick Leahy in a letter dated July 29th, FISA proceedings, decisions, and legal rationales are typically secret. America’s surveillance programs are secret, as are the court proceedings that enable them and the legal rationales that justify them; informed dissents, like those by Levison or Senator Ron Wyden, must be kept secret. The reasons for all this secrecy are also secret. That some of the secrets are out has not deterred the Obama Administration from prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act for disclosure of classified information. Call it meta-secrecy.

If Lavabit attempted to resist a FISA order, the first thing it would have done is petition the FISA court to review the order, arguing that it was flawed in some way. According to some legal commentators, such an argument, no matter how it is styled, would almost certainly fail; the FISA court so frequently approves surveillance orders that it is often criticized as a rubber stamp. If Lavabit’s petition failed, it could still drag its feet and force the government to petition the FISA court to issue an order compelling Lavabit to comply. This would give Lavabit another opportunity to press its case.

If Lavabit lost a petition to compel, and still refused to coöperate, it could seek review before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which has limited power to review FISA orders and is rarely adversarial. According to Judge Walton, only one company has had the chance to argue before the F.I.S.C.R. as a party objecting to an order—Yahoo, which initially refused to coöperate with the Prism surveillance dragnet.

If Lavabit lost its appeal to the F.I.S.C.R., and still refused to coöperate, it would run a serious risk of being found in contempt; that’s how most courts punish those who disobey its orders. The FISA court is no different. According to the court’s rules of procedure, a party may be held in contempt for defying its orders. The secret court may consider many punishments—secret fines for each day of noncompliance, or even secret jail time for executives. The idea behind civil contempt is that “you hold the key to your own cell.” If you comply, the punishment stops. But hold out long enough and your contempt may be criminal, and your compliance will not end the jail sentence or displace the fine.

With these powers, the FISA court could dismantle a stubborn e-mail service provider, or Facebook, piece by piece. An angry FISA court could demand increasingly severe fines, identify more and more officers for jail time, and make it impossible for Facebook to operate within the United States by issuing more (and more invasive) warrants. In this scenario, the FISA court would order Mark Zuckerberg, hoodie and all, to walk down the hallway to the FISA court’s reportedly unmarked door and explain whether he would coöperate. If he refused to comply, the court could jail him—and then pressure Sheryl Sandberg, and on down the line. Aside from the risk of the public finding out its surveillance methods, the court would only be limited by its willingness to violate the privacy of Facebook’s users, and inflict pain on shareholders, who would not have received the usual disclosures about the company’s books. (In an HSBC money-laundering case, for instance, afraid of harming the shareholders and destabilizing the financial system, the government ultimately blinked, and settled outside of criminal proceedings.)

Because FISA proceedings are secret, there are only a few examples of dissent. In 2004, the Internet service provider Calyx was served with a national-security letter. The letter came with a gag order, which Calyx’s owner, Nicholas Merrill, succeeded in getting partially lifted—after more than six years of litigation. In the meantime, Calyx shut down, with the goal of one day reopening as a nonprofit Internet service provider focussed on privacy. In 2007, a former Qwest Communications International executive (appealing his conviction for insider trading) alleged that the government revoked opportunities for hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts when Qwest objected to participating in a warrantless surveillance program. The government refused to comment on the executive’s allegations. And, finally, Yahoo resisted FISA orders in 2007 and 2008, according to published reports and Judge Walton’s letter to Leahy. But Yahoo ultimately buckled under the threat of contempt. In each case, the resisting company wanted to inform the public, but was initially denied.

Any one company rightly fears the FISA court’s ability to punish contempt. But the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs are impossible without robust coöperation from America’s telecommunications and Internet companies. Silicon Valley and the telecoms can’t press this leverage because meta-secrecy keeps the companies trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma. Microsoft doesn’t know if Google is heroically resisting. Tim Cook doesn’t know if Mark Zuckerberg has endured a secret jail sentence for freedom’s cause. No company wants to be the only one to disclose its coöperation with Prism and other programs, lest it appear to be weak on privacy and set itself at a competitive disadvantage. That’s why Google and other companies are petitioning for the right to disclose their participation. And, of course, nobody wants to be the first public company taken apart in contempt proceedings.