Lavabit, a company that operated an encrypted email service for more than 400,000 people — reportedly including NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden — before it shut down in 2013 under legal pressure from the FBI, rose from the dead today. In an federal court filing, the company came down in defense of Apple as the major technology company pushes back against the FBI’s demands to help it unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone.

As one might expect, the lawyers representing Lavabit LLC see a parallel between how it was treated and how Apple is currently being treated.

The filing comes on the same day that Box, as well as Airbnb, Amazon, Atlassian, Automattic, Cisco, CloudFlare, Dropbox, eBay, Evernote, Facebook, Facebook’s WhatsApp, GitHub, Google, Google’s Nest, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Mapbox, Medium, Meetup, Microsoft, Mozilla, Pinterest, Reddit, Slack, Snapchat, Square, Squarespace, Twilio, Twitter, Wickr, and Yahoo all took to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York to officially convey their support for Apple.

But the case of Lavabit is curious because it has not been active — unlike the tech giants who also weighed in today.

Lavabit has been fairly quiet over the years, even as similar services, like Silent Circle and Lavaboom, have come and gone.

In August 2013, without warning, Lavabit founder Ladar Levison took to the company’s homepage and explained that he had decided to shut down the service and that he was working on an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, he wrote.

“This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States,” he wrote.

Then, in May 2014, Levison resurfaced, and talked about some of the things that had happened. He was served court orders again and again, and he was subpoenaed so the federal government could obtain the encryption keys for Lavabit. Then the government got a search warrant in its attack on the company.

Ultimately, according to today’s filing, “After a lengthy legal battle, and a potential contempt charge, Lavabit surrendered the private encryption key. Lavabit then chose to cease operation of the email service.”

Gradually Levison was raising money for a “Lavabit Dark Mail Development Initiative.” He has been steadily providing updates in a Kickstarter campaign. In November, ZDNet reported that Lavabit could mark its return as the Dark Internet Mail Environment (DIME) by the end of the 2015. But that does not appear to have happened yet.

One of Lavabit’s attorneys did not immediately respond to VentureBeat’s requests for comment.

For a complete overview of the Apple-FBI encryption case, check out our timeline.

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