From http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/ "In an interesting work-around, Levison complied the next day by turning over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout in 4-point type. The government, not unreasonably, called the printout “illegible.” “To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2,560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data,” prosecutors wrote. The court ordered Levison to provide a more useful electronic copy. By August 5, Lavabit was still resisting the order, and the judge ordered that Levison would be fined $5,000 a day beginning August 6 until he handed over electronic copies of the keys." Companies like Verizon who are ordered to hand over "electronic copies" of metadata, passwords, and other material the government shouldn't get, should be convinced that they need to hand over that material in "electronic form": In the form of PDF files, of text that has been randomly ordered by line, and 'printed out' in a 'cursive' font, but not one in which each character always appears to be the same. Rather, each character will be pseudorandomly modified in order to simulate the variability of any person's written cursive, with overlapping characters. This will be analogous to the "Captcha" systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha , which is designed to be very difficult for a computer to convert back to ASCII or HTML text. The text will therefore be eminently readable to humans (at least if you're old enough to have been taught cursive in school!), yet virtually impossible to return to the form they'd like to see. (Alternatively, a similarly-variable Gothic script could be used, to add spice to the whole process.) Jim Bell