Suppose you're a typical nerd who lives buried in software all day long with relatively little contact with the big bad world. (Need any more proof of Levison's nerdiness? Lavabit used to be called Nerdshack. By the way, I don't mean anything negative by "nerd".) All of a sudden, you find yourself in the middle of the Snowden controversy, with a very real possibility of going to prison. You don't have much money, either. You don't know what to do. Under such circumstances, are you sure you would respond any more "maturely" than Ladar Levison did?

Levison made mistakes. Today's Wired article makes that clear. He was probably scared and confused. He should have sought legal counsel as soon as he received that first court order, preferably by calling EFF right away, but for some reason he didn't seem to have done so. His failure to work with a competent attorney (or maybe he ignored good legal counsel) probably caused more damage than what was strictly necessary.

But what happened, happened. What matters is what's going to happen next. If we're willing to stand up for a child pornographer's right to keep his hard drive encrypted, I think we should forgive Levison for his confusion as well. Thanks to his blunders, the case has now blown up into something completely different: for example, the Government's right to require the disclosure of SSL keys.