Because it is indeed criminal. From
the Guardian, an op-ed by Ladar Levison, who chose to shut down his secure encrypted email service rather than bend over for the feds. Excerpt:
The largest technological question we raised in our appeal (which the
courts refused to consider) was what constitutes a "search", i.e.,
whether law enforcement can demand the encryption keys of a business and
use those keys to inspect the private communications of every customer,
even when the court has only authorized them to access information
belonging to specific targets.
The problem here is
technological: until any communication has been decrypted and the
contents parsed, it is currently impossible for a surveillance device to
determine which network connections belong to any given suspect. The
government argued that, since the "inspection" of the data was to be
carried out by a machine, they were exempt from the normal
search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment.
More
importantly for my case, the prosecution also argued that my users had
no expectation of privacy, even though the service I provided –
encryption – is designed for users' privacy.
If my
experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already
know: courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance
under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived
of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue
operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved
one find yourself in a position like I did – standing in a secret
courtroom, alone, and without any of the meaningful protections that
were always supposed to be the people's defense against an abuse of the
state's power.
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