Less than 24 hours after Lavabit shuttered its doors, another US firm is shutting down its encrypted e-mail service.

Silent Circle, a company that specializes in encrypted communications, said it is preemptively turning off its Silent Mail product. It's doing so despite no urging at all from the government—no subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else, company co-founder Jon Callas wrote in a blog post today. "We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now."

"We apologize for any inconvenience, and hope you understand that if we dithered, it could be more inconvenient," he concludes.

Company CEO Michael Janke told TechCrunch that given his user base, he knew the government was going to come after them sooner or later:

There are some very high-profile people on Silent Circle—and I mean very targeted people—as well as heads of state, human rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many countries. We wanted to be proactive because we knew USG would come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us—let alone the “highly targeted high-profile people.” They are completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text, and Silent Eyes, but e-mail is broken because govt can force us to turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them to use the other three peer to peer products–we made the decision to do this before men on [SIC] suits show up. Now—they are completely shut down—nothing they can get from us or try and force from us–we literally have nothing anywhere.

The company will be leaving its Silent Phone and Silent Text services as-is. They're "end-to-end secure," and Silent Circle doesn't have any of the encrypted data, or metadata about conversations, writes Callas.

The preemptive move by Silent Circle is a contrast to what happened at Lavabit, a company that appears to be already embroiled in a dispute with the government. Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, said terminating his service was the only option, lest he "become complicit in crimes against the American public." He added that he's fighting in court to be able to tell more details of his story.

Levison shut down his company, a 10-year long project, just a few weeks after NSA leaker Edward Snowden used his service to summon human rights groups to meet him at Moscow's Shermetyevo airport.

Update 12:40 pm: In a conversation with the New York Times, Janke said that his company has even gone so far as to destroy its server. "Gone. Can’t get it back. Nobody can,” he said. “We thought it was better to take flak from customers than be forced to turn it over."