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Russia blocks ProtonMail

reuters.com

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Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#71

Post by panarky »

bnt wrote: post #40
Vaslo wrote: post #30

"Roskomnadzor said that ProtonMail had refused to provide Russian authorities with information on the owners of email accounts allegedly associated with fake bomb threats." I know ProtonMail is denying they got requests but hopefully this is a good advertisement for their willingness to protect individuals.

And if those bomb threats proved right and people get killed? Would you still praise Proton for not working with Law enforcement?

If Russia had a functioning democracy, with rule of law and an independent judiciary, if Russia's legal system resisted abuses of power, if law enforcement protected the people's interest against the interests of oligarchs and the politically connected instead of vice versa, I might have a different view.

But I have little confidence that surveillance requires warrants, or that warrants are only issued with valid probable cause of real crimes, and not against dissidents, journalists, political adversaries and business competitors.

Therefore, ProtonMail's only moral and ethical response is to refuse to cooperate with Russia's law enforcement.

The same would be true in China if ProtonMail was available there.

And given what we now know about the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I'd have to say they've become more like Russia than most care to contemplate.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#72

Post by gwd »

bnt wrote: post #40
Vaslo wrote: post #30

"Roskomnadzor said that ProtonMail had refused to provide Russian authorities with information on the owners of email accounts allegedly associated with fake bomb threats." I know ProtonMail is denying they got requests but hopefully this is a good advertisement for their willingness to protect individuals.

And if those bomb threats proved right and people get killed? Would you still praise Proton for not working with Law enforcement?

> And if those bomb threats proved right and people get killed?

Do you think Proton are the only people who don't trust the Russian police, and provide them with less information as a result, reducing their ability to solve real crimes?

One of the predictable side effects of having a police force / legal system that is used by the powerful to crush dissent that people don't trust you, even when there really are real threats.

See also the HK protests regarding the extradition bill, which was prompted by a guy who genuinely did murder his girlfriend in Taiwan.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#73

Post by vcavallo »

_jal wrote: post #59
vcavallo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed! and when a lot of people are talking about 'self-hosting' they're mostly talking about a VPS they rent from some provider who could vanish just as easily as Proton can. I'd like to see the numbers on how many self-hosting evangelists (I don't mean that term pejoratively. I think self-hosting is great) are actually talking about metal they physically control.

I can't tell where you want to draw the line. I personally have a couple physical servers in a cage. I do not own the data center in which they reside. Does that count? If I don't "self-host", then neither does the corp I work for, with hundreds of machines in other people's DCs...

My original (sort of absurdist) point was exactly that; saying "here's the line between 'smart people' and 'non-smart people'" is both pointless and rude.

Everyone has different threat models and resources.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#74

Post by fraktl »

abyssin wrote: post #53
fraktl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would. It's not Protonmail who's to be blamed for the potential attack and deaths. There are series of events that lead to people deciding to be terrorists. I'd focus on those reasons rather than hotfixing stuff by exposing 99.9% of other Protonmail users. I would never opt in to affect 99.9% of users because of 0.01% of users. We are all educated enough through events in recent history that clearly tell us how sim…

It seems you are writing two contradictory arguments. On the one hand you say hotfixing is no solution for terrorism. On the other hand you say blocking Protonmail is fine. Is there some irony that I missed here?

takeda summed it correctly. I'm not contradicting anything.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#75

Post by everdrive »

gfiorav wrote: post #15

I know it's easy to play conspiracy, but after watching this piece [0] on "active measures", it wouldn't surprise me that FSB finally found a way to hack proton mail, or the way to circumvent the block will expose some part of it. Hence this measure. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-d...

This sort of reasoning is almost always spurious. Without enough facts about the truth, people try to think about what the motivations of different entities would be, and then assume that those entities are able to pursue those motivations.

Usually, there is not enough information for a 3rd party observer to actually know the motivations of a large group, or know enough about the facts to know whether those groups were able to successfully pursue their incentives.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#76

Post by jjgreen »

xiphias2 wrote: post #55
bnt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if those bomb threats proved right and people get killed? Would you still praise Proton for not working with Law enforcement?

I never understood why police even accepts anonymous bomb tips. They should respond by requiring the person giving the tip to identify himself.

In the IRA's campaign in the mainland UK in the 1970s, they would provide a codeword along with the tip, after the first bomb the receivers would know that subsequent calls with the same codeword were legitimate.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#77

Post by abyssin »

takeda wrote: post #62
abyssin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you are writing two contradictory arguments. On the one hand you say hotfixing is no solution for terrorism. On the other hand you say blocking Protonmail is fine. Is there some irony that I missed here?

I don't see contradiction there. He is against proton mail disclosing information of its users, and if Russia decides to block access to their service in revenge, so be it.

Thanks for clarifying, it was a genuine question.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#78

Post by cblades »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #49
cblades wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope so. When the phone system was manually-operated switch boards, should the phone companies have been responsible for listening to every call and reporting suspicious activity to the police?

That's not the same scenario. Your scenario involves listening to everyone. The GP's scenario involves listening to a specific person with probable cause.

Given that the police wanted information after having already received the threats, they had to have requested some combination of historical and future data. They almost certainly wanted historical data primarily so that they could find the person who sent the threats.

There's no way to satisfy requests for historical data without capturing data from everyone.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#79

Post by yakireev »

Many commenters seem to miss the most important point here.

If users from Russia can't access ProtonMail - that's not that much of a deal. But if mail from ProtonMail stops reaching Russian email addresses - @mail.ru, @yandex.ru are as common in Russia as @gmail.com - that's a big problem for ProtonMail and its users.

Re: Russia blocks ProtonMail

#80

Post by _jal »

vcavallo wrote: post #73
_jal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell where you want to draw the line. I personally have a couple physical servers in a cage. I do not own the data center in which they reside. Does that count? If I don't "self-host", then neither does the corp I work for, with hundreds of machines in other people's DCs...

My original (sort of absurdist) point was exactly that; saying "here's the line between 'smart people' and 'non-smart people'" is both pointless and rude. Everyone has different threat models and resources.

As someone with more than one weird hobby, I'm pretty sure conflating 'smart' with 'committed to weird hobbies' is a sin weird hobbyists of every stripe commit.
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