Here my biases as a secure software engineer may be coloring my comments, because to my mind, building an architecture which solicits sensitive data from clients but fails to preclude the disclosure of those secrets without enormous engineering effort is the same thing as conceding that such disclosure is possible.

Imagine a mail service that operated solely as a Tor hidden service and required all users to use PGP --- for instance, by checking the contents of mail messages to ensure they were encoding them, and rejecting them if they weren't. That's a service that might reasonably make a promise not to cooperate with a court order.

Lavabit didn't have that system and instead had to make a difference promise: that they would shutter the enterprise before cooperating with a court. And so they did.

That's retarded though. The absence of getpeername calls in their frontend does not constitute an inability to comply with a pen register order.

There are costs of doing business and one of the costs is the ability to comply with lawful court orders. You are completely wrong about the government lacking the means to compel compliance.