The owner of Lavabit, the now-shuttered secure email provider, has been told that he could be jailed for terminating his service:

The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

“I could be arrested for this action,” Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden.

Lavabit said he was barred by federal law from elaborating on the order or any of his communications with federal prosecutors. But a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison’s lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered — stating that Levison may have “violated the court order,” a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.

This can be interpreted in two ways: Either they are threatening to jail him for fighting a broad subpoena in court, or they are threatening him because he shut down the service because he refused to run it as part of an ongoing and broad surveillance of his customers.

In either case, this is contemptible, even if it is nominally legal.