For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers. The linked email would lend some credence to those claims. It was originally designed in contrast to gmail scanning your email for targeted advertising, but my imperfect memory says that their system should also have been resilient to "we…
The data may have been protected, but the senders and recipients probably were not. Similarly to SSL, it encrypts the traffic, but does not hide which websites you use. I bet that data are still valuable to the government. I have been thinking of starting a business in the privacy space. This has shown me that that all customer data needs to be periodically obliterated in safe way and that a kill switch or nuke butto…
If you'll be trying to keep this secrect by creating small cells of people not knowing each other and smart mailboxes preventing people exchanging t identify each other, you'll become suspect of supporting spying activity.
So you better work for the minimal number of clients and charge a lot to remain sustainble.
My understanding is that as long as keep the info concentrated in one spot (i.e. Paper mail) it is easy to grab it. If you dilute and spread the info using shared secret and hide it smartly in images or random text, this info would be much harder to catch but could use conventionnal transport means.
Extending this idea further, turn the mail network into one big world wide hologram. The information would then be spreaded, available from everywhere, very hard to censor, and private since you need some specific reference signal to extract the info. It's like shared secret.
Note however that the need to catch evil people using such communication system for evil means is needed. Just considering our own privacy regardless of what can go wrong with such system is in my opinion selfish. We will always need method to protect against abuses.