When Edward Snowden communicated with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the journalists to whom he eventually leaked the NSA PRISM documents, he used an email provider called Lavabit. Snowden was already aware of the extent of the government’s digital surveillance, so the former contractor couldn’t choose just any email provider. Lavabit promised its users total encryption, with private messaging safe from any snooping interlopers. And even though he chose edsnowden@lavabit.com for a username, the service hid his identity long enough for the information to get out.

On August 8, however, Lavabit shut down, closing the accounts of its 410,000 users. Founder Ladar Levison posted a message on the website. “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,” he wrote. “I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.” The day after the leaks hit, the U.S. government requested metadata from Snowden’s Lavabit account. Though he had previously complied with some government data requests related to child pornography, Levison refused, but the government kept pushing. The founder eventually sent the authorities a list of all Lavabit’s encryption keys messily reproduced on paper, the New York Times recently uncovered, but was then fined $5,000 a day until he handed over a digital copy, and simultaneously closed his business.

In the PRISM era, truly secure data is increasingly rare. New companies like Lavabit are emerging to take advantage of the growing demand for privacy and creating a new market in the process. Like opening a Swiss bank account to keep your holdings safe and undetectable, those individuals and corporations with enough capital can now buy their way to security. The question is, can these new services actually guarantee your data's safety?

Computer security expert Jon Callas founded Silent Circle in 2012 as a “secure information service for people who travel and live abroad… so that they can communicate securely with people back home,” he explained. The company launched an email service as well as a smartphone messaging and voice app that uses peer-to-peer encryption, which keeps information safe by encoding it when it leaves the sender and decoding when the data arrives at the recipient. Since it doesn’t store any of its users’ activities, there’s nothing to give up when the government inevitably comes knocking, as was the case with Lavabit. “There are no keys on a server. There is no metadata we collect,” Callas wrote in an email.

The NSA inadvertently caused a boom in Callas’s business. Since the leaks, “we have seen our revenues quadruple,” he noted. At $9.95 a month, the Silent Circle phone and text package is accessible for mainstream consumers (though it only works with other Silent Circle users), and the company offers a larger, more expensive system to businesses wanting to keep their communications private. But their products aren’t perfect. In August, the company shut down the Silent Mail client, fearing that it wasn’t as secure as intended. The encryption keys to decode the email were stored online, leaving them vulnerable.