Comment by ben_w

It's not legal, they've just not yet had the book thrown at them yet.

One thing I've taken a long time to internalise is the gap between the law as written vs. the judicial system. There's a famous meme that the average (US) citizen unwittingly commits three felonies every day: it simply isn't possible to throw the book at everyone, which means that enforcement is rather selective even when there isn't anything dodgy going on.

However this does mean that someone can get away with a lot if they know who will and won't (and what they will and won't) prosecute. I'll let people's imaginations fill in who that might be.

But for everyone else, cross an invisible tripwire and you get e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit and https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1992/nov/...