Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

and the lesson here is that everyone who called out Protonmail for being sus (suspect) on signup was correct.

try using Tor to create a protonmail account and they require both javascript and a phone number.

yeh yeh client side encryption requires javascript, but seems better to just have an unlinked email that can be read server side and there are plenty of Tor-only email providers for that.

phone number under an "anti-spam" guise is just suspect.

If you think that's bad, Tutanota was forced by the court to change their SW, so that all incoming e-mails for a specific account would be intercepted before encryption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27303712

Your own self-hosted service on rented server / cloud instance? AFAIU (IANAL!!!) you can refuse to give evidences against yourself in most jurisdictions.

I don't thinks that dedicated server provider (like Hetzner) or cloud provider (like Digital Ocean or Vultr) stores traffic logs with enough details to be useful in such case.

But payment will be a problem...

Disclaimer: I have a ProtonMail account that I pay for.

I have seen a ton of disturbing pieces about ProtonMail. Every time I've looked into them, they seem to be maliciously motivated and usually not true, or otherwise twisting of the truth. This has been a confusing thing for me because why is there a small subset of people so vehemently against them?

In this case, I'm not surprised. They say quite clearly they can be compelled to collect IP addresses - including in the linked tweet. This seems like a pretty clear cut case of them being compelled to provide an IP address. What the authorities can't do, is read that person's email. And that's what I and others pay for.

I'm not sure what there is to be upset about here? Other than perhaps France prosecuting this individual to begin with? If we had faith that ProtonMail wouldn't hand over anything to the government, why would anyone even care about having encrypted emails?

The terrible crime of squatting, according to some comments in that thread